Cinema: Eragon

After Amy’s last concert last weekend we decided to go to a movie. I knew Eragon had just come out, and was thinking “dragon movie, cool”. We were coming from Everett, so the first thought was to go to the nice movie theater in downtown Bellevue on the way home. But once we turned off the highway I quickly realized this was a mistake. The traffic was horrible and there were hordes of people doing Christmas shopping. I started to get a little wigged out by all the unexpected masses of people. (I’m fine in Manhattan and such, cause it is expected, but here I was thinking a nice quiet afternoon movie, and that was not what was happening, so I wanted to go elsewhere.)

So we ended up going to a movie theater closer to home, but not as nice, and not quite as crouded. Then they started the previews several minutes early. I had timed a trip to the bathroom to make it back just in time. It was just the commercials at the beginning, they hadn’t even gotten to the first actual preview yet. But it annoyed me. If you say you are going to start at a certain time, you need to start at that time.

Then it went downhill from there. The actual movie started with a narrator giving an overview of the history leading up to the start of the movie. During that Amy started talking about one of the actresses and some movie she had been in before, so I missed some of the narration. By this time I was already in a bad mood, so I decided I didn’t want to see the movie any more, cause I’d missed about 15 seconds of the intro. But Brandy wouldn’t let me leave. Then there were several other distracting episodes too, but by that time I was just mad, and not really thinking about the movie any more.

Meanwhile, it didn’t help that the movie itself was really really bad. Bad dialog. Bad acting. Obvious rip offs of other movies. (Although from my understanding, although I have not read it, this is true of the book too.) You never got to caring about any of the characters at all. And I dare say, even if I hadn’t already been in a bad mood ready to trash it even if it was the best movie of the century, I still would have thought it was bad. The dragon… I didn’t like her voice at all. Didn’t match. Didn’t work for me.

Anyway, if it is still in the theaters, definately don’t waste any cash on Eragon. Maybe wait for DVD if you are really bored one night and have nothing else to do.

OK, maybe that is all a BIT harsh, I was in a really bad pissy mood at the time I saw the movie. So maybe it actually was a good movie. But I’m thinking no.