Sunday, October 30, 2016

Trash Bin: ERAGON


Welcome to another installment of the TRASH BIN, where we watch the worst movies Hollywood has to offer, according to the critics, and give you our thoughts, good or bad. This week's pick is the 2006 fantasy film...ERAGON.

This week, I watched Eragon. I hate myself for doing it. But I did. I grew up reading The Inheritance Cycle, falling in love with Christopher Paolini’s mythology and the deep, richly-constructed characters. And...well......

You know that show Catfish? The show where people meet other people online who turn out to be con artists and the 21-year-old model that you fell in love with is a 44-year-old methhead who hasn’t worked out a day in his life? That’s what this movie did to me. This movie catfished teenage me with a stellar cast, a beautiful book to base its story upon, and a kickass Avril Lavigne song on the radio.

The acting in this movie, despite involving such monuments of cinema as John Malkovich and Jeremy Irons, taught me as a child that some people will do anything for money. Perhaps Jeremy Irons needed to pay for an extra spire on the castle I assume he lives in. Maybe everyone was just extremely bored and needed to fill a month’s time on a green-screen somewhere. IMDb trivia claims that Ed Speelers beat out 180,000 applicants for the film’s title role which proves to me that life is truly unfair. I’d love to say that Rachel Weisz’ Saphira was a redeeming performance, but watching her lines on YouTube this morning apart from this trainwreck of a movie, I can’t even give her much credit.

The effects in Eragon are...alright, I guess. Saphira breathes fire nicely, which is a complete misunderstanding of the beauty of the book’s progression, for Saphira isn’t supposed to breathe fire until her final climactic fight. Yes, I know. Books vs. Movies. Literature vs. Film. Two separate mediums. I understand. But when, in the second act of your movie, you kill off the major villains of your base book’s sequels, you f***ed up.

At the very least, fantasy films should supply a decent universe of characters. I hate to break it to you, Director Stefen Fangmeier, but there should be noticeable differences between dwarves, humans, and elves. You should not cut out hundreds of pages of a story and reduce your film to ninety minutes. You should not treat your viewers with such disdain.

The purpose of Trash Bin is to showcase movies that are genuinely disliked by critics and moviegoers, giving a new take on their qualities. For Eragon, my new angle is simply that this movie is nowhere near as bad as you remember. It is somehow even worse. It is not a two hour snooze-fest. It is not forgettable. It is not just another fantasy film. It is a dumpster fire (and I apologize to all artistic dumpster fires that have ever existed). Go watch a better fantasy film like Lord of the Rings. Heck, watch The Hobbit. Watch Percy Jackson and you’ll get more enjoyment than you will from this “movie".



Eragon was the last major film to be released on VHS. It killed my poor teenage heart, killed a franchise, and killed a brand of home media. Eragon is a truly atrocious movie.

CRITIC'S SCORES:

Rotten Tomatoes: 16%
Metacritic: 38
IMDb: 5.1/10

JONATHAN'S SCORE: 2/10


Make sure to check us out and like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram for all of our reviews, news, trailers, and much, much more!!!



No comments:

Post a Comment