I just got back from seeing Eragon. Not a bad movie, though not a great one, either. It seems to bring up a bit of a catch-22. I really wish I had seen this movie before having seen The Lord of the Rings, because that movie set the bar pretty high for fantasy movies in general. I think, had I seen Eragon before LotR, I would have been much more impressed with it. However, I also recognize that this movie probably never would have been made prior to Peter Jackson’s magnum opus. Rings legitimized the genre in a way that no other movie had up to that point, and made Hollywood take notice of the fact that fantasy was, in fact, a viable genre for a blockbuster movie.

As to the movie, itself, though: like I said, it was alright. There’s nothing really terribly new or fresh or original in Eragon. At its heart, it’s basically a collection of genre tropes assembled together into a storyline that mirrors that of Star Wars: A New Hope pretty closely. There’s a Luke character, and a Leia character, and a Ben Kenobi character, and the dragon riders are basically the Jedi, right down to having been betrayed and hunted down by one of their own. There’s even an Uncle Owen character. Really, the most appealing thing about the movie is the dragon, which is admittedly very, very appealing. But the movie, itself, is pretty predictable. I don’t fault the movie for this, though, or the director or the screenwriter. It’s based off of a book (as you probably know), and the author was a mere fifteen years old when he wrote it. This, I think, shows.

Now, I don’t want you to come away with the impression that I didn’t like Eragon. I mean, I won’t be going out and buying the book anytime soon, but I enjoyed watching the movie, and I’d gladly watch it again, if only for the scenes with the dragon (and Jeremy Irons, who was also very good). Were I currently in the business of assigning cold, hard numeric values to subjective experiences, I’d probably give this movie a 7 out of 10. Not great, but a solid effort, and worth the time it takes to watch it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.