Eragon
Eragon is the film based on the novel of the same name by author Christopher Paolini. The film was directed by first-timer Stefen Fangmeier and the screenplay was written by Peter Buchman, the guy best known for that marvel of screenwriting for Jurassic Park III. Not exactly off to a good start, are we? Eragon was actually the tenth worst reviewed film of 2006, a criticism which I found slightly too harsh, but wound up being the 31st highest grossing film of that same year. It was released on DVD in March of 2007.
Eragon follows a teenage farm boy named, of course, Eragon. In the film, Eragon is played by Edward Speleers in his debut film role. Interestingly, Speleers auditioned for the role of Peter in the Narnia film but lost out to William Moseley in the final round of auditions. Anywho, the film follows Eragon as he lives in a village called Carvahall in the fictional realm of Alagaësia, as created in Paolini’s “Inheritance Trilogy.” One day while hunting, Eragon stumbles upon a dragon egg. He takes the egg home and out of it hatches a CGI dragon named Saphira. Eragon decides to keep Saphira a secret, but a couple of magical ugly creatures are sent by the evil King Galbatorix (John Malkovich) to locate the dragon and Eragon. Eragon flees and finds his uncle dead, so he sets out on a journey with an astute storyteller named Brom (Jeremy Irons) to gain his retribution. In the process, Eragon takes up the legacy of the “Dragon Riders” and learns how to ride Saphira. He also learns a bit of magic and some cool sword fighting tricks.
Eragon was filmed in diverse locations around Hungary and does have some nice looking scenery shots, although it doesn’t achieve levels of splendour that have been seen in other fantasy stories on screen. But that’s just it, really. The predicament for a film like Eragon and other fantasy films is that creating visions of fantasy on the big screen is an uphill climb. Whereas science fiction can rely on ultramodern setups, the preponderance of fantasy tales takes place in lands that actually need recreation to a certain degree. It really ends up being an all-or-nothing approach and creating a fantasy either requires absolute raptness a la Peter Jackson and several years in New Zealand or it’ll flop brusquely in our modern times. Eragon, in my view, wound up on the latter because of a few critical errors.
The first is the lack of character development. With a story with such prospective capacity, we are merely thrust into the middle of the state of affairs and none of the characters are given enough time to be appealing. The film clocks in at a mere 103 minutes, which is rather pithy for the tale it is trying to tell. With an audience relentlessly looking for the mysterious “something new,” while still accepting the same formulas for other genres without dispute, it appears to me that creating a film like Eragon requires a lot more build to please the critics than it had. In my opinion, this character development facet could have saved the story a great deal of disorder and could have generated actual interest in the predicament.
The plot is actually quite good. It is straightforward enough and yet contains enough modern elements to satisfy most of the audience. The notion of being not quite good enough, for example, is played up several times throughout the film as Saphira is a dragon that is adolescent and inexperienced and Eragon is the same. This notion of youth is a nice touch for the genre and plays up “not being in control” in a fashion akin to the Harry Potter films but with a vaguely different spin. This notion, predictably for the most part ignored by critics looking for flawlessness, gives the film a nice human flavour that separates it from the herd.
The basic rub on Eragon, for me, is that the characters are too one-dimensional for the plot. I think the film should have been given more time and more space in which to manoeuvre and that it felt rushed to a large degree, leaving several things undone and several things resonating with incompleteness. As a result, Eragon is fairly typical. It does not deserve the thrashing from the critics, however, as there are far more inferior films from 2006 with far worse tenacity. Eragon’s final sequences, for example, were fun and audacious with a good pace and nice effects. Eragon suffers most from its lack of strength and personality, not from banality.
Trailer:
