excuse me while i rant at length
Jan. 17th, 2008 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amatyultareNew icon! I'm not really happy with the coloring, but such is life.
And now, to rant.
So first of all, reading Eragon immediately after finishing a trilogy of power and grace like His Dark Materials was not the best idea. And certainly at least somewhat unfair to Eragon. But I wanted to see if the book was 1) as bad as some of what I've heard and 2) as bad as the movie, which I watched with Eric and Erica a week or so back. So I spent most of the day reading it (and fighting off the urge to throw the book into the snow).
Wow. Where to begin?
First, to put things in context, I advise those who haven't read the book/seen the movie to read this review of the movie. Actually, I suggest you read it even if you've read the book AND seen the movie; the review is hilarious and also brings up most of my major problems with the movie.
I'm not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing for me to have seen the movie before I read the book. It took away all of the suspense (not that there was much suspense to begin with, believe me) but since my primary source of entertainment in reading the thing was watching for differences between the book and the movie, I suppose it was for the best.
The book makes a LOT more sense in places than the movie--reasonable, as the movie needs to keep things moving and skips a lot of sub-plot and background. Although why the movie-makers felt it necessary to have the dragon grow from the size of an eagle to the size of a car in the space of five minutes, I don't know. I'm not talking about a montage either; she flies up into the sky and disappears from view momentarily, Eragon barely has time to pout and suspect that she's gone forever, and she lands as a full-grown dragon.
As the movie cuts out subplot elements and minor characters, it makes it much more obvious that the bones of the story were stolen directly from Star Wars; you'd have to think about it a bit more with the book. On the J.R.R.T. rip-off side, the film has some absolutely painful imitation LOTR scenes (my personal favorite was Durza addressing his massed armies of Uruk-hai--excuse me, Urgals, from a tower in his best Saruman imitation, right before they go off and storm the Varden headquarters *cough*HelmsDeeplite*cough*).
I found Eragon as a character more obnoxiously stupid in the movie than in the book. Also, the movie-Eragon actually has the line "Brom, I've got skills", delivered with as much of a straight face as the actor can manage, which about sums up THAT character.
John Malkovitch as Evil King Galbatorix is ridiculously terrible; his delivery is bad enough (his first line made me burst into uncontrollable laughter) but then there's the moment when you realize that he is delivering every single line with the same exact intonation. I kid you not. You almost can't blame him, though, since his lines are cringeworthy.
On a side note, the review is right that Jeremy Irons deserves better; I thought he did a great job with his character, which is probably the reason why Brom was my favorite character in the movie. Too bad, because in either the book and the movie you only have to think about the plot for about thirty seconds to realize where Brom fits in and exactly what's going to happen to him.
One semi-big thing that bugged me about the movie was....well, I am not a tactical genius here, but imagine this scenario. You are trying to defend a fortress-like building on one side of a gigantic cave. The only entrance is on the far side of this huge cave, out of arrow's reach from the fortress itself. In between is a village where your fighters and their families usually live. The entrance is basically a long, narrow tunnel that opens out into the cave--a bottleneck, if you will. Oh, and your defenses are mostly archers, plus a fire breathing dragon.
You choices are to A) put archers and the fire breathing dragon near the bottleneck entrance so they can hit the enemy while they are bunched up and easy to kill en masse or B) Keep everyone at the fortress, INCLUDING the dragon, until the enemy troops have moved past the bottleneck and spread out, making the archers painstakingly pick them off one by one and forcing the dragon to burn the entire village in order to kill these enemy forces.
I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this; I'll let you fill in the punchline for yourselves.
So much for the movie. Watch it, if you watch it at all, with low expectations and preferably with the intent to mock. You'll get the most enjoyment out of it that way.
So, what about the book? First of all, the author started it when he was 15 and finished when he was 19 (and according to Wikipedia, years three and four were all about marketing and advertising, not writing or editing it). Don't get me wrong, younger people *can* be very good writers, but as a general rule you haven't found your best writing voice by the time you're 16 or 17. Anyway, his parents apparently own a small publishing company. They promptly published the book and started a huge campaign to make it popular enough for a major publisher to pick it up, which Knopf eventually did.
I'm personally working under the assumption that by the time Knopf actually picked up Eragon, the book was popular enough that their editors couldn't insist on a whole lot of changes. I'm mostly making this assumption because it makes marginally more sense than assuming that the editors at Knopf are idiots and truly thought the book was fine as it was. (If you want a laugh, check out the Wikipedia article on the second book, 'Eldest'; the only really positive review comes from Barnes and Noble, which is trying to sell the book and therefore may be just a tad bit biased.)
There's really too much to discuss, so let me hit some of the high points (and by 'high', I mean 'so low they're almost coming back from the other direction as high'). How did this book ever get even the mildly good reviews it has acquired?
First, of course, there are the rip-offs. I said that the book makes it slightly less apparent than the movie that the plot is lifted wholesale from Star Wars. And it does--slightly. And even that's almost counteracted at the last minute by book-Eragon gratuitously acquiring a whole load of Durza's (wannabe Darth Vader) memories which shows that he really didn't WANT to be evil and is good at heart, maybe! (Although whether this is a Vader moment or a Gollum/Smeagol moment is debatable, I suppose....)
When it's not mimicking Star Wars, the story keeps busy by filing the serial numbers off various elements of LOTR and then swearing up and down it bought them in a second-hand store six months ago, I'm sure I have the receipt around here somewhere, Officer. I was almost ready to forgive the whole Eragon/Aragorn name similarity (and did I mention that book-Eragon is going to have a very long life because he's one of the Dunedain, blessed with long life whoops, just kidding, because his bond with the dragon extends his life?) until I discovered that Arya, Eragon's fated One True Love (TM) is actually an elf (this detail being mercifully skated over in the movie).
(Although I like Arya, especially when she is describing how she was tortured and mentions, briefly and obliquely, that she saved herself from being raped by using magic to make all of the guards impotent. Smart girl.)
I could keep going for days. In the book, the Varden hideout is even more recognizably Helm's Deep that in the movie, except that the author went, 'hey, what if the Hornburg actually was IN the Glittering Caves? Wouldn't that be cool?' and Made It So. And let's not even get into the Forsworn, the dragonriders who were corrupted by Galbatorix (at least there's twelve of them instead of nine) or the deep and mysterious forest in which the elves reside.
In its spare time, as the book goes a little deeper into the nature of the dragon-dragonrider bond and the culture of dragonriders, the story also gets a chance to declare self-righteously that these elements WEREN'T stolen shamelessly from Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, no really! I'm betting that Arya gets one of the remaining dragon eggs, and Murtagh (Eragon's maybe-best friend) gets the other (please note, I made that prediction BEFORE I read the Wikipedia summary of Eldest). F'lar, F'nor, and Lessa, what? The thought never crossed my mind.
I could go on, but why bother? Everyone knows the Inheritance Cycle (NOT trilogy, as the author apparently decided to write a fourth novel. Yippee.) is entirely derivative. My bigger gripe with the book is that it's poorly written. First of all, there are parts of the story that are just ridiculous. For example, the rebels had held Saphira's egg for years, after stealing it at great risk and loss of life from the Evil King himself. Problem is, the dragon would only hatch for someone worthy of being her rider, and both the humans and the elves wanted one of their own to be the chosen one. The solution they came up with, and the reason why Arya was attacked and Eragon got the egg in the first place, was to regularly shuttle this small, easily stolen, unspeakably valuable egg between the capital of the elves to the fortress of the humans, a journey that coincidentally took them and it through the entirety of the kingdom ruled by the Evil King.
This reminds me of nothing more than the Huffapods in Voyage of the Dawn Treader who, when the cat gets into the kitchen, spend an hour dragging all of the milk out of the kitchen instead of just removing the cat. Finding a secure place to hide the egg, then bringing candidates to IT, apparently never occured to the best minds of the rebel elves, humans, and dwarves. No wonder the Varden hasn't gotten anywhere in a hundred years of fighting; they're all idiots.
Then there's the obviousness. Okay, it's a book for young adults and all, but do we really need to telegraph how the main mysteries are gong to end up to quite this extent? Particularly the whole 'mystery' of Eragon's parents. Please. I'm terrible at picking up on hints myself but I was getting a headache from getting beaten so hard over the head with the answer to this supposed 'mystery'.
The actual phrase-to-phrase writing of the thing is serviceable, I suppose, but nothing to write home about at best and gets much worse in places (especially dialogue). The best part is when the author starts throwing around words and phrases that he clearly doesn't fully understand (seriously, where the HELL were his EDITORS?). My personal favorite example is when he describes the golden helmet of the king of the dwarves as being 'lined' with precious gems. Dear, you mean 'edged' or perhaps 'covered in' gems; the 'lining' of an article of apparel is on the inside of said garment, and gemstones on the inner surface of a helmet would be both silly and uncomfortable. Another great 'wtf?' moment is when Eragon is about to go unarmed into the Varden village and his dragon tells him to bring his bow, "although we must not be overly trusting." Those two commands...are actually not in opposition.
My biggest problem with the writing of the book, however, are the main characters, especially Eragon. I mentioned he's less of a brat in the book than in the movie, which was a relief. At first. Then I realized the awful truth.
Eragon, in the book, has no personality.
Now, many of the secondary characters have vivid and interesting personalities (the witch Angela, for example, and Saphira herself). But somehow, the author assumes that we should just figure out what Eragon is like without ever seeing any of his emotions, never getting description about his manner of behaving, and never seeing him do anything besides react to events in the most obvious and boring ways. "My uncle was killed, let's get revenge. Here's this pretty elf girl who's clearly important to boot, let's save her. We're being attacked by urgals, let's fight." Yawn. Forget 'showing' versus 'telling' in describing the character; the author doesn't do either, leaving Eragon utterly forgettable.
And that, in my opinion, is what really dooms this book. I feel absolute indifference towards Eragon, and I can't imagine many readers, however young they may be, feeling differently. That, in the end, is the series' fatal problem.
Ridiculously long rant over.....I think I'll go to bed now that it's all out of my system. Night, all!
And now, to rant.
So first of all, reading Eragon immediately after finishing a trilogy of power and grace like His Dark Materials was not the best idea. And certainly at least somewhat unfair to Eragon. But I wanted to see if the book was 1) as bad as some of what I've heard and 2) as bad as the movie, which I watched with Eric and Erica a week or so back. So I spent most of the day reading it (and fighting off the urge to throw the book into the snow).
Wow. Where to begin?
First, to put things in context, I advise those who haven't read the book/seen the movie to read this review of the movie. Actually, I suggest you read it even if you've read the book AND seen the movie; the review is hilarious and also brings up most of my major problems with the movie.
I'm not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing for me to have seen the movie before I read the book. It took away all of the suspense (not that there was much suspense to begin with, believe me) but since my primary source of entertainment in reading the thing was watching for differences between the book and the movie, I suppose it was for the best.
The book makes a LOT more sense in places than the movie--reasonable, as the movie needs to keep things moving and skips a lot of sub-plot and background. Although why the movie-makers felt it necessary to have the dragon grow from the size of an eagle to the size of a car in the space of five minutes, I don't know. I'm not talking about a montage either; she flies up into the sky and disappears from view momentarily, Eragon barely has time to pout and suspect that she's gone forever, and she lands as a full-grown dragon.
As the movie cuts out subplot elements and minor characters, it makes it much more obvious that the bones of the story were stolen directly from Star Wars; you'd have to think about it a bit more with the book. On the J.R.R.T. rip-off side, the film has some absolutely painful imitation LOTR scenes (my personal favorite was Durza addressing his massed armies of Uruk-hai--excuse me, Urgals, from a tower in his best Saruman imitation, right before they go off and storm the Varden headquarters *cough*HelmsDeeplite*cough*).
I found Eragon as a character more obnoxiously stupid in the movie than in the book. Also, the movie-Eragon actually has the line "Brom, I've got skills", delivered with as much of a straight face as the actor can manage, which about sums up THAT character.
John Malkovitch as Evil King Galbatorix is ridiculously terrible; his delivery is bad enough (his first line made me burst into uncontrollable laughter) but then there's the moment when you realize that he is delivering every single line with the same exact intonation. I kid you not. You almost can't blame him, though, since his lines are cringeworthy.
On a side note, the review is right that Jeremy Irons deserves better; I thought he did a great job with his character, which is probably the reason why Brom was my favorite character in the movie. Too bad, because in either the book and the movie you only have to think about the plot for about thirty seconds to realize where Brom fits in and exactly what's going to happen to him.
One semi-big thing that bugged me about the movie was....well, I am not a tactical genius here, but imagine this scenario. You are trying to defend a fortress-like building on one side of a gigantic cave. The only entrance is on the far side of this huge cave, out of arrow's reach from the fortress itself. In between is a village where your fighters and their families usually live. The entrance is basically a long, narrow tunnel that opens out into the cave--a bottleneck, if you will. Oh, and your defenses are mostly archers, plus a fire breathing dragon.
You choices are to A) put archers and the fire breathing dragon near the bottleneck entrance so they can hit the enemy while they are bunched up and easy to kill en masse or B) Keep everyone at the fortress, INCLUDING the dragon, until the enemy troops have moved past the bottleneck and spread out, making the archers painstakingly pick them off one by one and forcing the dragon to burn the entire village in order to kill these enemy forces.
I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this; I'll let you fill in the punchline for yourselves.
So much for the movie. Watch it, if you watch it at all, with low expectations and preferably with the intent to mock. You'll get the most enjoyment out of it that way.
So, what about the book? First of all, the author started it when he was 15 and finished when he was 19 (and according to Wikipedia, years three and four were all about marketing and advertising, not writing or editing it). Don't get me wrong, younger people *can* be very good writers, but as a general rule you haven't found your best writing voice by the time you're 16 or 17. Anyway, his parents apparently own a small publishing company. They promptly published the book and started a huge campaign to make it popular enough for a major publisher to pick it up, which Knopf eventually did.
I'm personally working under the assumption that by the time Knopf actually picked up Eragon, the book was popular enough that their editors couldn't insist on a whole lot of changes. I'm mostly making this assumption because it makes marginally more sense than assuming that the editors at Knopf are idiots and truly thought the book was fine as it was. (If you want a laugh, check out the Wikipedia article on the second book, 'Eldest'; the only really positive review comes from Barnes and Noble, which is trying to sell the book and therefore may be just a tad bit biased.)
There's really too much to discuss, so let me hit some of the high points (and by 'high', I mean 'so low they're almost coming back from the other direction as high'). How did this book ever get even the mildly good reviews it has acquired?
First, of course, there are the rip-offs. I said that the book makes it slightly less apparent than the movie that the plot is lifted wholesale from Star Wars. And it does--slightly. And even that's almost counteracted at the last minute by book-Eragon gratuitously acquiring a whole load of Durza's (wannabe Darth Vader) memories which shows that he really didn't WANT to be evil and is good at heart, maybe! (Although whether this is a Vader moment or a Gollum/Smeagol moment is debatable, I suppose....)
When it's not mimicking Star Wars, the story keeps busy by filing the serial numbers off various elements of LOTR and then swearing up and down it bought them in a second-hand store six months ago, I'm sure I have the receipt around here somewhere, Officer. I was almost ready to forgive the whole Eragon/Aragorn name similarity (and did I mention that book-Eragon is going to have a very long life because he's one of the Dunedain, blessed with long life whoops, just kidding, because his bond with the dragon extends his life?) until I discovered that Arya, Eragon's fated One True Love (TM) is actually an elf (this detail being mercifully skated over in the movie).
(Although I like Arya, especially when she is describing how she was tortured and mentions, briefly and obliquely, that she saved herself from being raped by using magic to make all of the guards impotent. Smart girl.)
I could keep going for days. In the book, the Varden hideout is even more recognizably Helm's Deep that in the movie, except that the author went, 'hey, what if the Hornburg actually was IN the Glittering Caves? Wouldn't that be cool?' and Made It So. And let's not even get into the Forsworn, the dragonriders who were corrupted by Galbatorix (at least there's twelve of them instead of nine) or the deep and mysterious forest in which the elves reside.
In its spare time, as the book goes a little deeper into the nature of the dragon-dragonrider bond and the culture of dragonriders, the story also gets a chance to declare self-righteously that these elements WEREN'T stolen shamelessly from Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, no really! I'm betting that Arya gets one of the remaining dragon eggs, and Murtagh (Eragon's maybe-best friend) gets the other (please note, I made that prediction BEFORE I read the Wikipedia summary of Eldest). F'lar, F'nor, and Lessa, what? The thought never crossed my mind.
I could go on, but why bother? Everyone knows the Inheritance Cycle (NOT trilogy, as the author apparently decided to write a fourth novel. Yippee.) is entirely derivative. My bigger gripe with the book is that it's poorly written. First of all, there are parts of the story that are just ridiculous. For example, the rebels had held Saphira's egg for years, after stealing it at great risk and loss of life from the Evil King himself. Problem is, the dragon would only hatch for someone worthy of being her rider, and both the humans and the elves wanted one of their own to be the chosen one. The solution they came up with, and the reason why Arya was attacked and Eragon got the egg in the first place, was to regularly shuttle this small, easily stolen, unspeakably valuable egg between the capital of the elves to the fortress of the humans, a journey that coincidentally took them and it through the entirety of the kingdom ruled by the Evil King.
This reminds me of nothing more than the Huffapods in Voyage of the Dawn Treader who, when the cat gets into the kitchen, spend an hour dragging all of the milk out of the kitchen instead of just removing the cat. Finding a secure place to hide the egg, then bringing candidates to IT, apparently never occured to the best minds of the rebel elves, humans, and dwarves. No wonder the Varden hasn't gotten anywhere in a hundred years of fighting; they're all idiots.
Then there's the obviousness. Okay, it's a book for young adults and all, but do we really need to telegraph how the main mysteries are gong to end up to quite this extent? Particularly the whole 'mystery' of Eragon's parents. Please. I'm terrible at picking up on hints myself but I was getting a headache from getting beaten so hard over the head with the answer to this supposed 'mystery'.
The actual phrase-to-phrase writing of the thing is serviceable, I suppose, but nothing to write home about at best and gets much worse in places (especially dialogue). The best part is when the author starts throwing around words and phrases that he clearly doesn't fully understand (seriously, where the HELL were his EDITORS?). My personal favorite example is when he describes the golden helmet of the king of the dwarves as being 'lined' with precious gems. Dear, you mean 'edged' or perhaps 'covered in' gems; the 'lining' of an article of apparel is on the inside of said garment, and gemstones on the inner surface of a helmet would be both silly and uncomfortable. Another great 'wtf?' moment is when Eragon is about to go unarmed into the Varden village and his dragon tells him to bring his bow, "although we must not be overly trusting." Those two commands...are actually not in opposition.
My biggest problem with the writing of the book, however, are the main characters, especially Eragon. I mentioned he's less of a brat in the book than in the movie, which was a relief. At first. Then I realized the awful truth.
Eragon, in the book, has no personality.
Now, many of the secondary characters have vivid and interesting personalities (the witch Angela, for example, and Saphira herself). But somehow, the author assumes that we should just figure out what Eragon is like without ever seeing any of his emotions, never getting description about his manner of behaving, and never seeing him do anything besides react to events in the most obvious and boring ways. "My uncle was killed, let's get revenge. Here's this pretty elf girl who's clearly important to boot, let's save her. We're being attacked by urgals, let's fight." Yawn. Forget 'showing' versus 'telling' in describing the character; the author doesn't do either, leaving Eragon utterly forgettable.
And that, in my opinion, is what really dooms this book. I feel absolute indifference towards Eragon, and I can't imagine many readers, however young they may be, feeling differently. That, in the end, is the series' fatal problem.
Ridiculously long rant over.....I think I'll go to bed now that it's all out of my system. Night, all!
