Lame. L. A. M. E. Yeesh. Many Reasons.

I was bored. Really. It was late. But not that late. The scenery and moving shots are really quite captivating. But I was just bored. Really bored. Ironic given how much of it they changed. I rarely actually knew what was next, and I was still bored.

Why oh why do they keep screwing up the elves??? Is it a conspiracy thing or someting? It's like anti-elf bigotry. Here's the deal. My biggest beef with Lord of the Rings was a pretty serious de emphesis of what I felt was the elven nature, and part of the underpinnings of the whole epic. But oh well. They did a pretty good job with lots of other stuff. But this? It's just wrong. It wasn't hard. It was not hard to get even close. She wears black. She's distant and aloof. Strong and stern as steel. Wicked good with sword. And can do magic. Well, we, get to see her throw a sword at someone once.

Scenery Screwups. Most of the scenery was gorgeous. The pans, etc. But come on. When Eragon looks out over the hills and watches the sunset, don't show huge fields cut out of the forest with perfect straight lines. No midieval culture could cultivate massive, evenly edged fields like that. And when the horses come riding down paths, pick the paths that are single file, not the kinds that are obviously car tracks! It was just distracting.

Plotline painted into a corner. I expected rewriting of the plot. Different ways of getting at different things. But certain things just seemed egregious. For example, total lack of lady friend for Roran. Hello!! A huge part of Eldest sets in motion because of that relationship. It felt like that the whole through. That the plot just veered further and further from the book. And I found myself wondering "If they do an Eldest movie, will I even recognize it?" Another huge part of Eldest is Eragon's sojurn with the Elves. As I said already, that relationship is already totally at odds with the relationship between Eragon and Arya in Eldest. The whole magic thing is completely misrepresented. The book takes great effort to explain the relationship between doing something with magic and where the power comes from to do it. That's kind of a main development in Eldest too.

The foreshadowing nearly killed me. If there's any issue I have with the books, its that the outcome in Eldest is pretty obvious. That's OK, it's a book targetted at adolescents supposedly. The movie foreshadows its own big events. And it's so obvious. One of the reasons I was so bored was that I was just waiting for the point where he was going to jump on the tail. And I was waiting for the point where "he would be strong enough" to heal someone.

Dialogue. Stilted. Painful. Halting. It's worse than Star Wars III. No more need be said.

Saphira's sudden transformation from labrador with wings to large lizard with feathered wings (they were leathery membrane in the books). Stupid. Was a time elapsed fade so hard? I'm sitting there in dissapointment and thinking... "huh??". And then she speaks. Gak. Rosie O'Donnel would have sounded better.

Background: I read this book (and the sequal Eldest) about 9 months ago. When we saw the trailiers a month or so ago, the older kids thought it looked cool. As is the rule, you don't get to see the movie without reading the book. I read out loud to the family in the evening, so we made that our next book. We all thoroughly enjoyed (myself for the second time). We looked with eager excitement to the movie. I warned the kids (and myself): the movie won't be as good. It never is. They have to change things, to keep the time acceptable, and because some things (such as Brom's narrative and explanatory monologues) just don't work well in movies. I'd even noticed that the reviews weren't so hot, so my expecations were really not up there. Even the kids didn't like it. I figured they'd look past it and just be wowed by the cool fighting and digital effects. Not even. Too bad really. Pretty good book. Read it. Skip the movie.