Sunday, July 15, 2007

And as long as I'm going off on the Dark is Rising

Bellatrys sums up the changes quite nicely:
Will in the books is unselfish, concerned for his family's well-being ahead of his own, a serious and recollected kid who looks out for others. In the movie, at least from the trailer footage, he's a thoughtless brat who only sees in his newfound powers a chance to show off cool superpowers and give nothing in return, whining worse than Young!Luke to Ben Kenobi about having to go save the world. And Luke had more responsibilities, and fewer allies and resources, at the time!
Oh, and Soyo found the trailer:


What book did they get this from?

4 comments:

  1. Yes, but imagine if Ian MacKellan had played Gandalf as a doddering idiot, for laughs, or had played him worse yet as a crass clown who loved fart jokes? Wouldn't that have been worse than having someone of no great acting ability in the role, but who respected it? And I'm no fan of Jackson's movies, btw, but Sir Ian is a great actor and he played the role, mm, with integrity ("straight" not the right word, avaunt creeping heteronormativity!)

    McShane apparently is one of the many despisers of the books involved in this production - he's the one who said they were unreadable because they were "dense" and "written in the Seventies" and hopes there will be no sequels. If you have that much contempt for a role, then it hardly matters how good an actor you are, there's no way you're going to do it justice and not travesty it.

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  2. Oh, hey, here's the link to the higher res version of the trailer at the official site - I forgot to code the link in my rush to post.

    The glowy-block SFX for the "time travel" effect are just as bad at hi-res, too.

    And watching it over again, I realize that they totally didn't acknowledge one major source for their work: The Matrix. Even the framing of the scene with the mall cops (complete with American accents) is straight out of the scene with the as-yet-unempowered Neo...

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  3. This is from Walden?!?!

    WTF happened to the people who made such an awesome version of Bridge to Terabithia? The people who made their name making movies like Because of Winn-Dixie and I am David? Even Narnia looked better than this - tons better.

    And the Dark is Rising series is too dense? Has the man ever read anything more complicated than a Grisham novel?

    (Ok, here's where I shamefully admit that, along with Charlotte's Web, I somehow missed The Dark is Rising as a kid. I'm kinda doubting it's any denser than the Chronicles of Prydain, though.)

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