My brother went and saw it last night with his 9 year old - both big fans of the book - and they hated it. It’s bad when a 9 year old fantasy fan watches dragons on screen and hates it.
I’ve heard that the kid who wrote it is basically a non-talent and it was glossed up a lot and partially ghost-written by his publisher so they could build hype around their 15 year old “author”. Does anyone know how true, if at all, that is?
Haven’t seen the movie & certainly don’t intend to - but some of those reviews on Rotten Tomatoes were hilarious!!! Some of the funniest reviews since the “Gigli” days.
Don’t these guys have a right to make their mortgage payments just like everyone else? 
How is a book “chalky”? I obviously can’t agree or disagree, but I’ve just never heard a book described that way.
I’m tempted to see it because the guy who plays Eragon looks kinda hot in the trailers. Hey, I’m only a year older than him…
Bolding mine - Gotta agree with you there. The first time I saw the trailer for this (with Jeremy Irons chewing the scenery like there’s no tomorrow), my eyes nearly rolled back in my head. There was something in the shots I saw (apart from La Irons) that just reminded me so much of the D&D movie.
But thanks to you all for confirming that I shouldn’t go and see this. Quickflix ahoy!
How Eragon got a dragon, got a life, and got kissed? 
Currently 5.2 on IMDB. That’s BAAAAAAAAD!
The commercials I saw made up my mind for me-- no go.
The funny thing I think is that one of the characters is named Hrothgar- which is very similar to a character name I used while playing the tongue-in-cheek MMORPG Progress Quest.
I had heard that Palatini was 15 when he wrote the book, but I would like to know if he really is just a Viswanathan as Cisco presumes.
I just saw it. It had moments. Let’s say a C+.
Hrothgar was king of the Danes. He hired Beowulf to fight Grendel.
Must have had the name “Hrothgar” stuck in my subconcious then. Wouldn’t be the first time it had happened- at one point I was convinced I had written The American Patrol.
I believe it was first published by a vanity press. That was owned by his parents. I like to add that, because it makes it sound like other vanity presses turned him down. It would not surprise me if they hired an editor who had a free hand to make changes, but I haven’t read that anywhere.
Interesting information on Paolini International, LLC:
.
The books I can find that were published by them:
Bryan, Gerald Barbee. 1940. Psychic Dictatorship in America. Pray, MT: Paolini International, LLC
Kenneth Paolini, Talita Paolini. 400 Years of Imaginary Friends: A Journey Into the World of Adepts, Masters, Ascended Masters, and Their Messengers. Pray, MT: Paolini International, LLC.
Check Amazon on the latter, see scathing reviews that make me think more highly of the Paolinis.
Hmm…would you say it’d be worth watching if I rented the DVD, turned on the French language track, but left the subtitles off?
Well, if you added bathing your scrotum in nitric acid, I figure it’d be an even match.
That was brilliant.
Of course, now I’ve gone from ‘complete disinterest’ to ‘ghoulishly intrigued’.
It sounds so horrible, it’s become quite compelling.
Having read both books, (and liked the first one) the second book I think proves that they were not written by the same person. The style, tone, etc was way too different to be written by one person. Especially for a sequal type book. IMHO of course…
No.
I saw it last night. Bad, bad, bad. Easily supplants Dead Man’s Chest as my worst movie of the year. Worse than Attack of the Clones. Probably the worst movie I’ve seen in theatres since Wild Wild West, and even there it’s a close call.
The dialogue was incredibly terrible. Obviously I knew that it would be cheesy, but there’s good cheese (Star Wars or the original Pirates of the Caribbean, for example) and bad cheese. This was bad cheese. The screenwriters apparently just jotted down whatever line came into their head. No attempt to spice things up, no humor, no nothing. For the whole movie, I was filling in the dialogue before it was actually said, and I was never wrong by so much as a word. When the fortune-teller what’s-her-name promises to show, “your past [pause] and your future”, half the audience filled in “and your future” before the character did.
The movie was badly organized. They had to fit in every stereotypical bit of melodrama imaginable, and thus didn’t give any of it time to work. For instance, when Eragon’s finds his uncle dead, he immediately gets mad at Bron (or is that Brom?) and attacks him. Then thirty seconds later they’re best friends again. The ending, in particular, was a disaster. Eragon has met up with the rebels (Varden? Vanden?) and the climactic battle begins five minutes later. There’s no time to get to know who these people are, so why would we care about them?
Everything was done on the cheap: special effects, costumes, makeup, set design. Couldn’t the village have had more than three huts? Would that be too much to ask? And the evil King’s headquarters looked particularly shoddy. So he’s ruled the country for fifty years, yet all he’s acquired in that time is a throne and a big, black-and-white poster? He’s got a long way to go before he competes with real evil overlords.
The acting. Sweet Og, the acting. This movie is going to get so many Razzie nominations that other worthy contenders like Little Man may be completely shut out.
I will pass over the abundance of cliches, crude emotional manipulation, and outright copying from other fantasy series, since those were presumably flaws that the movie inherited from the book. Suffice to say, this movie is what the word crap was invented to describe. It’s not fun camp like Dungeons and Dragons . Nobody–not the writers, actors, or director–was willing to make the effort to claw their way up to mediocrity.