Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Trilogy (currently “Eragon” and “Eldest”) has been keeping me company over the past few weeks and I have to say that I’ve grown pretty attached to the whole Alagaesian landscape. They’re not perfect books — or even very original — but they’re entertaining in a way that Harry Potter or other well-executed pop literature are, and make for great light reading every night before I go to bed.
The movie though, was unbelievably horrible. Allow me to nitpick as only an Eragon fan can:
1. No elves or dwarves.
This isn’t a discrepancy so much as a huge-ass rewrite. The political triangle formed by the humans, elves and dwarves was a big part of what made the first book interesting, and the fact that there are no elves in the film version makes me wonder how in the world they’re going to adapt the second book (where Eragon undergoes some fairly crazy transformations). Arya, who Eragon saves from the Shade, is supposed to be an immortal Elvish princess, and the short bearded guy with the Scottish accent was supposed to be the dwarf warlord Orrik. And part of the reason why Eragon’s Dragonrider status is so controversial is that most Riders were elves, not humans. (The first Rider, also named Eragon, was Elvish, for example.)
Now, although I think it’s atrocious that they decided to gloss over such a key element, I do have an idea of why they did it: it’s too much like Lord of the Rings for the average movie fan to swallow. With Peter Jackson’s adaptation being the high watermark for all film fantasies, it’s likely that the filmmakers wanted to avoid any direct comparisons to what is undoubtedly a better movie. (On the other hand, every major fantasy has elves and dwarves; it’s not like LotR has a patent on them.) Either that, or they just couldn’t afford Orlando Bloom/John Rhys-Davies.
2. No John Malkovich.
I have nothing against John Malkovich as an actor, and I do think that his scenes were decent and all. The thing is though, the evil Rider Galbatorix doesn’t actually appear in the first book. Indeed, he doesn’t appear in the second book either. He’s mentioned all the time of course, but he never actually has any scenes. The idea was to build up this evil, unseen force for a huge final confrontation, and revealing him early on considerably reduces the “unseen” part of that equation.
3. Cruddy-looking Urgals
To make a loose sci-fi comparison, Urgals are portrayed in the book as the Klingons of Alagaesia. The particular race of Urgals that Eragon encounters, called the Kull, are eight feet tall and built like tanks. They’re not the kind of creature that you could kill with a single swipe of your sword. The ratio, as I recall, was something like 4 human warriors to one Kull. In the movie they look like bulky Mudvayne rejects. Not exactly the most awe-inspiring (or indeed, fear-inducing) henchmen you’ll ever meet.
4. Baby dragon all grown up now
This is more of a stylistic peeve than anything else, but in Eragon the movie, there’s a scene where Baby Saphira takes off, undergoes a series of weird explosions and emerges a full-grown dragon. In the book, several months have passed before Saphira is bigger than her Rider. The choice to abbreviate this section of the book is actually at the heart of my biggest issue with the adaptation, which brings me to:
5. 90 friggin’ minutes
You know how Lord of the Rings had 2 1/2 hours running time per movie, and still had about 20 minutes of extra scenes in their respective extended editions? Eragon needed to be like that. Every epic needs to be like that. 90 minutes is just a ridiculous length to be aiming for; you’re forced to shoehorn too many sequences into too little time. 90 minutes is the length of a Disney cartoon, and even the Harry Potter movies, which were collectively a far more kid-friendly story than the Inheritance trilogy, was longer than that.
The decision to truncate so many of the story’s key sequences — Saphira’s growth, Brom and Eragon’s journey across Alagaesia, Eragon’s pseudo-rivalry with Murtagh, the political struggles within the Varden — severely diminished what was a fairly compelling fantasy, instead reducing it to a picture book of cardboard cutouts and awkward one-liners.