If, for whatever strange reason, someone had been tracking my thoughts as I watched Eragon the movie, they would either by impressed or offended at my ability to swear in several languages.  I’m not a person that swears often, but when there’s nothing else to say I make an exception.  And believe me, Eragon the movie was an exception.

I have a lot of bones to pick with the movie adaptation, so I’ve divided it into different categories, each with its own score.

Characters: 1/5.

I don’t think they could have possibly gotten the characters any more wrong.  It just doesn’t seem possible.  Murtagh, Angela, Brom and Arya…they were all so different from what they were like in the novel.  Okay, I get that they can’t put every little detail from the book into the movie, but they can try to get the character’s personality right.  Right?

Well, it seems like they didn’t even try.  Murtagh was cheerful and eager to go to the Varden, in stark contrast to the moody, tortured warrior Murtagh in the novel.  Garrett Hedlund was about as believable a warrior as my little sister would be.  Arya wore a dress and actually seemed to like Eragon in a romantic way.  In the novel, Arya was a strong warrior who never wore dresses except in her homeland; she wore men’s clothes because they were practical.  She was a practical and, at times, ruthless character.  And she certainly did not warm up to Eragon very much throughout the whole cycle, let alone the first novel.  I think one of the problems was that the filmmakers decided to put too much emphasis on the ‘sexy’ aspects and in doing so, did not stay true to the characters.  They didn’t even really achieve ‘sexy’ either.

The one character I did like was Saphira.  Rachel Weisz did such an excellent job with her voice and by extension, her personality.  Since we cannot directly see her thoughts as we did in the novel, the few lines Saphira did have were so important and Weisz nailed them, in my opinion. Continue reading →