film | Bored of the rings

"There was a time when the fierce and beautiful land of Alagaësia was ruled by men astride mighty dragons ..."

So goes the opening narration of the swords-and-sorcery yarn ERAGON, voiced by none other than Jeremy Irons in a bored sigh that says, "Yeah, yeah. I know: I have an Oscar, I'm too good for this shit, yadda yadda. But hey, they all can't be Reversal of Fortune. I gotta eat, and ... and Malkovich is in this, too!" It's a portent of the not-quite-inspired goofiness to come in director Stephen Fangmeier's clunky adaptation of Christopher Paolini's kid-lit tome, from the bizarro casting — Blood Diamond's Djimon Hounsou as an elfin ruler in a brunette pageboy, Trainspotting's Robert Carlyle as an evil warlock who's styled to resemble a gene-pool orgy between Meat Loaf, Gloria Stuart and Evil Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (gah! my eyes!) — to the wonky dialogue that'd feel at home in comic-book-blurb form but sounds pretty damn nutty emitted by actors trying to be serious: "Into the sky to win or die!", "Durza will send his Urgals after us!", and, my personal favorite, "Before you can cast a spell, you must learn the magic language of the elves."

Newcomer Edward Speelers plays a young farmhand who stumbles across a mysterious oversized egg while hunting and becomes the guardian of the female dragon pup it hatches. She grows at an alarming rate and begins to telepathically communicate with Speelers (Rachel Weisz of The Constant Gardener provides her vocal purr), which leads to endless scenes where the dragon and the boy mentally chit-chat while quietly blinking at each other. I dunno. When a character speaks, I enjoy seeing its face and mouth move accordingly, but that's a minor distraction alongside how blatantly Star-Wars-with-fire-breathing-behemoths-instead-of-X-Wing-Starfighters the story is. There's the murdered uncle, the kidnapped princess, the wizened mentor — there's even a moment for our blonde, callow hero to stare off into the sunset as the orchestral score swells. And there's John Malkovich as the dark lord Galbatorix, whose wonky moniker might be a cryptogram that decodes to spell D-A-R-T-H V-A-D-E-R. Toss in some J.R. Tolkien (nasty monster-soldiers) here and a bit of J.K. Rowling (mystical scars) there, and you've got an effects-laden medieval mélange that's as blandly inoffensive as it is overtly familiar. When I learned that Paolini was only in his teens at the time he put this tale on paper, I thought, Yep, that sounds about right. C-