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Words fail me. This is the utmost cliched movie on the face of the earth. And I can't understand why. The cast here, besides the awful main character are all wonderful in most movies, and do do a good job here too. Robert Carlyle worked great as a villain, even though he was barely recognisable under the heavy make-up. John Malkovich does great, even though we propably see him for a massive ten minutes or so throughout the entire movie. The guy who plays the main character is terrible though, with his awful brittish accent and Orlando Bloom-ish manners. He does shout better than Orlando though, which is basically what he does throughout the entire movie.
I'm getting tired of talking about mediocre things, so let's talk about the script here, which is awful. First of all, Christopher Paolini's original is a terribly cliched book, but the script here, for some odd reason, was propably made by someone who had never even seen a screenplay before. Buchman skipped ALL the goddamn character development and overall meaningfull scenes, and added tons of utterly useless scenes such as that one where Carlyle is mad at his minions. What was the point of that scene? To show that he is a dominant force in the lines of evil? We knew that already for crying out loud. Then around the beginning of the movie, there's a fortune telling scene, because, well you know, you can't have a fantasy movie without a fortune telling scene now can you? Oh wait, I think I need to cough... *Cough*LOTR*Cough* Bless me. The dialogue is also a little too close to retarded, a departure from the relatively witty one in the book. I can't understand why they had to leave that dialogue out since it would've worked better than these classic lines like " That's the spirit - one part brave, three parts fool." Also, as a sidenote, in the movie that line sounds like the last word would be food.
Technically, this is a pretty damn mediocre movie. You have your run of the mill special effects, which should've been better since this movie is occasionally about nothing but CGI. The score.. or actually, the entire sound mixing of this movie is just fucked up. The score itself is decent, nothing to be nominated for an Oscar or such, but still. But the way it's been mixed to the movie is awful. You can barely hear the music, since for some ridicilous reason even during action scenes which really do need good music to be great the sound is just too damn low. Whoever edited/mixed the audio here was an idiot, plain and simple. He didn't know what he was doing. Which gets us to the director. Even though he kinda did know what he was doing, the directing here is simply meaningless. It doesn't feel like it was directed by a person, all the camera work and such are far too machine-like to make us feel like we would be watching something other than a movie.
I didn't like this movie all too much. It did however sorta keep me entertained and Robert Carlyle is always a blast. I still can't give it any higher than a 3/10 because some really important things were really fucked up here.
3/10
