Enter the Eragon

[Almos]

Derivative.

Pedestrian.

Cliche.

Star Wars rip-off.

These are just the few of the many adjectives used by reviewers who survived face-to-face meeting with "Eragon". Others went mad. If their words hold true then, verily, we live in dark times when the biggest studios are willing to give cash to directors coming up with such crappy ideas as this one. I haven't seen this movie yet, so I can't speak for myself. But the image that emerges from these reviews is gloomy, as gloomy as the dark reign John Malkowitch holds over the land of Alga-something-esia.

 Is there, among us readers, lurkers, and even spammers on this forum to come forth and face this beast alone in the cinema? Or is there anyone who already managed this feat?

[RCMerchant]

Isn't  an Eragon a shadowy lobster like creature bred for food by intergalactic teenagers?

[Masked_Maverick]

^^ you forgot one word: Crap

[Derf]

I have braved the terror that is Eragon (my daughter is into dragons; what could I say?).

***SPOILER-ishness***

It is indeed all that the critics have proclaimed it to be. Cliched (the writing is horrible). Derivative (every easy-to-spot "twist" you've ever seen used in a bad movie is used here: the hero foolishly rushes in to save the girl against impossible odds, and succeeds, but only at the cost of his mentor; the hero is amazingly adept at things others take years to develop; the hero saves the day and his best friend in totally unsurprising ways, despite the attempt to make it surprising, etc.). Pedestrian (I wanted to walk out. Oh, wait that's not that means. But it was pretty bland storytelling as well). Star Wars rip-off (too many details to go into. After the movie, my daughter was telling me about all the stuff they changed from the book. If they added in all the stuff she told me about, critics would also be calling it a Lord of the Rings rip-off).

Oh, and John Malkovitch must have really needed a paycheck. I wouldn't have believed someone with his acting ability could have been so painfully horrible to watch; he was reciting cliche after cliche so woodenly I was looking for him to pull off a rubber mask to reveal himself as really being Ben Affleck.

[Jim H]

Haven't seen the movie, but I have read the book.  It's very derivative, most obviously of the Pern series (though not as much as you might think), LOTR and Star Wars. 

It's still a brisk, entertaining read, and a good accomplishment for a 17 year old's first novel. 

Film I'll probably see when it hits DVD.  I'm a sucker for dragons too.

[dean]

Wasn't the book written by a 15 year old?

Anyways, I haven't seen it and don't really care to, but my friend [who is a Star Wars nutso] thought it was fun enough, even despite the terrible Star Wars rip offs, so I suppose there isn't all bad news for Eragon I suppose.

[Andrew]

Note: I have not seen the film, only read about it a few places and here.

I wonder if the reason it is so close to the fold for "Star Wars" is the original writer's age.  I think a lot of writing comes from the author's experiences.  While I am an amateur, the varied life I have seen through the Marine Corps and friends has to have helped my writing.  Rather than a limited pool of events, people, and places to pull from, it has provided a  lot of variables.  The author of Eragon would not have such a mental reference library.

Not that some teenagers would not out-write and out-think me, but certainly a person's life must have something to do with what they write.

[Ash]

Dude...you're not an amateur!
You've been writing here for what...8 years now?

I would not call that amateur.

[Almos]

Yeah, I've too began meddling with letters when I was young - in fact, I've started writing when I was younger than Paolini - but from what I remember, the things I've written back when I was fourteen of fifteen were already - I can't say "mature", but they already were explorations of abstract/philosophical concepts rather than rip-offs of other people's writing. Example? Unfinished novel "Songs of the desert": a man receives a letter from an old friend who's living a secluded life in a manor in the woods. The friend urges him to come to his abode as soon as possible - and our protagonist does, only to find the friend killed by some monsters/supernatural forces... So far, it was a clear rip-off from Lovecraft. But what followed wasn't: having fled from the manor our protagonist finds himself on the verge of some kind of desert. A man he meets there informs him that the place he found himself in isn't really a place - rather, it's a plane where the time had been transformed into space (hence what he perceives as space is really - time). The man (I still remember his somewhat oriental name - "Krong") acts as his guide in this - uh - temporal plane of existence. On their way through the desert (I no longer remember where they were going to, or why) they encounter such places and people as city where men worship themselves as gods.

 When I've written it I was either fourteen or fifteen, very into Lovecraft, and didn't know about concepts such as divinity of man, inherent in the teachings of old, gnosticism in particular. I wrote it at the very same age when Paolini started to create his (allegedly, still have to read it for myself) cliched epic. Young age is no excuse for being derivative; sci-fi and fantasy genres give us chance to explore the abstract possibilities, a chance missed by most of the authors.

  Nowdays I write rather sparsely; in most of my stories I focus on the characters, on what happens inside people's head, on their feelings and emotions, including those that cannot be clearly labeled or described. Sample of my present style can be found at this URL: http://www.kult-rpg.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=1312 but beware, the english is my second language (I happened to have been born in the Eastern Europe). Come to think of it, perhaps I should have followed in Paolini's footsteps, namely: be born in USA, into parents running publishing business, write a book that's shallow but entertaining, get it published and make cash. Who cares about psychological complexity anyway?...

[Derf]

Please note that my harsh review is for the movie, not the book. I can respect a young man who has, if nothing else, the stick-to-it-tiveness to complete multiple publishable works, derivative or not. My problems with the movie involve professional script writers who seemingly cannot write dialog worth listening to. The movie obviously cuts out huge amounts of developmental material with no exposition to cover any of it. This leaves most of the moments that are supposed to be emotionally moving seeming hollow and even more cliched. It makes the movie feel rushed, and this is a problem with the script and director more than a problem with the original source material. My own publishing history is sparse: I have had works printed in a few college publications, though none of them have any great reputations. I kind of gave up a few years ago on finding my niche in the world of published fiction. However, as an English teacher with a degree in Creative Writing and Literature, I think I am fairly well qualified to judge what passes for decent dialog and story structure. Eragon the movie is deficient on both counts; the dialog is stilted and riddled with cliches, which good script writers should have fixed, and the storytelling seems so intent on getting to the big scenes that the journey to develop those scenes gets left out and everything (the characters, the situations, the fictional universe) seems very sketchy. I hope the book does a better job at least with developing the characters and situations in the story; the movie has taken away any interest I might have had in reading it.

[Flangepart]

Dude...you're not an amateur!
You've been writing here for what...8 years now?

I would not call that amateur.

Not when you do so well!  8 years Bad writer=Amateur, 8 years good writeing,= NOT amateur!
Truse me on this...

[Rombles]

OK, I have neither read the book nor seen the movie, but can offer one insight into this.... the book sells like bloody hotcakes.  As the scheduler for Australia's largest RFP book printer, I can tell you that if I had a dollar for every copy of the book (and the sequel, "Eldest") that we have printed in the last couple of months I would be a very rich man!  I think we had 5 separate orders for reprints of it in the two weeks leading up to Christmas alone!  This would be close to this year's Da Vinci Code (extremely popular despite questionable literary merit).

[Jack]

I had to laugh the other day when they played an ad for it, saying it was "hailed by critics" or some such crap.  It was funny because I'd just been reading the reviews, almost all of which were negative.

[Jim H]

A little bit more of a comment on the book...  Still haven't seen the movie, but from what I gather it does have more character and plot development.  The villain also doesn't appear in the first book at ALL.  He is just referenced.  And the final battle in the film was made up for the film. 

In particular, they spent quite a bit more time on the book in the dragon growing up, which apparently is played as if it happened in a single day in the film. 

[BoyScoutKevin]

Okay, now I made the connection.

While I had heard of a teen-age author who had written a book and had it published, and I had heard of "Eragon," I never connected the two.

Which means I'm slightly more impressed with his second novel, "Eldest." When I first picked it up, not recognizing the author was so young, I thought: "This is not written very well. I'm not impressed."

On the other hand, reading alot of fantasy, about 60% of everything I do read is fantasy, these are the authors who do impress me.

1.  For the ability to write a good, even a great, action scene.
a. Terry Brooks
b. Dennis McKiernan
c. Douglas Niles
d. Clifford D. Simak

2. For the ability to write great characters.
a. David Cook
b. Troy Denning
c. J. Robert King
d. Mary Kirchoff
e. Richard A. Knaak
f. Chris Pierson

3. For the ability to write charcters with which I identify.
a. Tonya R. Carter
b. Fergus Ryan
c. Paul B. Thompson

4. For the ability to write a scene as real as it gets.
a. Nancy V. Berberick

5. For the ability to write a sex scene, that doesn't make you want to hurl.
a. Margaret Weiss

6. And just because.
a. Tracy Hickman
b. J. R. R. Tolkien

And the greatest of these is . . .
Tolkien

And the name of the land in "Eragon" is Alagaesia. Rhymes with milk of magnesia.