Eragon

What're the odds that I'd run across a movie and a book that both have the same title?!  Well, ok, that happens all the time I suppose.  In this instance, I'll be reviewing Eragon, giving a bit of my highly sought after opinion on both. 

The big excitement that got me to read the book was that I lived in the next town over from the young wunderkind author, and as this was Montana, it was a pretty big deal.  So, how'd the youngster do?  Well...he did pretty well for himself, and the stories aren't too bad.  The target market really is the younger crowd though.  If you're a big fan of Lord of the Rings and such, you'll really need to be in the right mood to read Eragon and the rest of this trilogy. They are LotR-lite.  I mean this in a fairly literal sense.  There is a heavy influence at work here (elves, dwarves, magic, quests, etc).  The writing is the cheap romance novel equivalent for the fantasy genre, but minus the sex (like I said...great for the younger crowd). 

The story is roughly this:  Eragon is a young farm boy who through crazy random happenstance obtains a dragon egg.  The dragon hatches, thereby choosing Eragon as her rider which sets off the chain of events for the plot...namely that it's Eragon's destiny to ultimately challenge the ruling tyrant king John Malcovich.  They successfully do this by going to the 7 and 1/2 floor of the Mertin Flemmer building in NYC...  wait...  sorry...  wrong movie.  Back on track here, along the way they meet bad guys, and with assistance and tutelage from a variety of characters, young Eragon is learning the tools of the saving-mankind trade.

It might be a good one to recommend to your kids (I probably will with mine), but for my money, I'll take something more along the lines of Tolkien.

Ok, the book was so-so, what's that mean for the movie?  Well, great movies have been made out of flimsy books, so the movie needs to stand on its own.  Did they do a good job, or did they not, that is the question.

They did ok.  It's not great, and it could use some serious work. Regardless of book quality, the book quantity was definitely there, and there were many story elements to accommodate in the formation of a movie.  After the wildly successful LotR movies, each in excess of 3 hours, I was really surprised to see the movie lurch along as though they had a bus to catch (1 hr, 40 min).  Longer, of course, doesn't always equate to better, but in this case their brevity hurt the film. The acting was ok, but parts that would've helped flesh the movie out better were lacking.  They ran forward with some of the plot points so fast and loose that I'm not quite sure what that means for a potential sequel.  It's been awhile since I read the book, but I'm reasonably sure that the movie wasn't too terribly faithful in places.  Kinda like the book, your kids will probably like this, but again, I'd take a re-watching of LotR.