Welcome back to my silly lil blog where I yell about da movies. I’ve freed myself from the shackles of monthly reviews and will instead be posting whenever I have something worthwhile to say going forward. And after a few months of hunkering down in my apartment and enduring an absolutely bonkers gauntlet of nightmare scenarios in my personal life, I’ve got some stuff that I think is worth saying!

When the going gets tough, I tend to fall into familiar patterns. I eat a lot of Taco Bell, play a lot of League of Legends, watch a lot of Mandalore videos, and most importantly for the sake of this post, I read the Eragon books. 

I absolutely LOVE every single one of them. They’ve been the ultimate comfort series for me since I was in middle school, and despite how uh, poorly regarded they are by folks who read a lot of fantasy, I genuinely believe that they hold up pretty damn well. That is, assuming that you’re willing to make a few concessions for the sake of enjoying yourself. 

But this is a blog about movies, not books. Which means that if I want to openly gush about my favorite novels I should probably tie them into the cinema. And we’ll get there, I promise. But first please allow me to provide you with:

A PASSIONATE DEFENSE OF THE INHERITANCE CYCLE

 (that’s the official name of the Eragon Quadrilogy)

I think it’s best to start with a very brief overview of what these books are about. To vastly oversimplify things, a farm boy named Eragon (yes his name is one letter off from Dragon, just roll with it) finds a dragon egg and becomes a dragon rider. He and Saphira (the iconic blue dragon from the cover) set off on an adventure seeking revenge for the death of his uncle that eventually turns into a quest to become strong enough to defeat the evil king, Galbatorix. Along the way he hangs out with and befriends a few different standard fantasy races (Elves, Dwarves, Definitely-Not-Orcs), falls in love, learns how to use magic, acquires powerful weapons / artifacts, fights in sprawling battles, and just generally does the kind of things you expect a fantasy protagonist to do. 

If you’re a cynical jerk, this might sound like a blatant rip-off of both Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, but this time the Lightsabers are Dragons. And honestly, I can’t even really argue with you on that. It’s not the most original story ever told. 

But at the same time, do me a favor and re-read that. Star Wars in a pure fantasy setting with dragons instead of lightsabers is actually just an incredibly cool premise. The dragons in this universe are less like animals and more like their own fantasy race. They can communicate and have their own distinct personalities, but because they’re all but extinct most people don’t know anything about them. A huge part of the series is watching Eragon and Saphira’s relationship develop as they each grow up and come into their own as individuals. It’s a unique dynamic and does a ton to keep the story feeling fresh even though it spends a lot of time treading familiar ground. 

There’s also a really cool magic system. The general rules are that in order to cast spells, you need to know words in the Ancient Language. For example, Brisingr means Fire. But the words themselves aren’t direct, one-to-one spells. Instead, they function as a way to translate your intent into an actionable transfer of energy. So saying Brisingr could cause you to throw a fireball, or light a campfire, or even just create a light source. There’s this layer of creativity and flexibility to the system that makes magic feel, well, magical. 

But the catch is that casting spells requires the same amount of energy as it would take for your physical body to perform the same feat. With something like a fireball this can feel a bit abstract, but for something like lifting up an Urgal (those are the not-orcs) and throwing them it’s a bit easier to conceptualize. You can still become more efficient at this use of energy through practice and training, but it’s a nice limiter that prevents people with control over magic from being too powerful compared to an average human.

Additionally, the longer the series goes on, the older the author gets (he was 18 when the first book was published). This leads to one of my favorite things about the books: You can literally feel Paolini growing as a writer in between each entry. The first book reads like it was written by a kid that wanted to be taken seriously and to emulate the classics that clearly inspired him. The second has a bit more meat on its bones, but there’s still a sense of discomfort in tackling anything beyond the basics. 

But then you hit the third, and suddenly it feels like an entirely new author has taken over. From the first page it’s immediately apparent how much more effort he’s putting into his craft. The prose loses that clunky quality, but is still simple enough that you can just devour it. The plot has also leveled up a ton at this point, with a lot of the simple groundwork that was laid earlier branching off into significantly more interesting directions. 

And it rules! It’s so good! Like, I know that a ton of this stems from it being the first big fantasy series I connected with as a kid, but these books informed so much of my taste as an adult. I’m a massive sucker for stories with multiple POV characters and that’s entirely because of how goddamn cool Roran is as a character. I remember getting to his first chapter in the second book after a lifetime of static POVs and thinking to myself “Wait, you can do that???”

Remember how I mentioned the standard Elf-Dwarf-Orc trio of fantasy races? Guess what, there’s also Werecats, and they’re so cool. They’re more or less Maine Coons that can shape shift into child sized humans that mostly hang out with witches, it’s the best.

So with source material this strong, there’s no way that a film adaptation could be bad, right….?

Eragon 

(Da Movie)

I have been actively avoiding this film most of my life. Sitting down and watching it feels like a mistake, your body physically recoils from the visuals displayed on your screen. It’s the specific kind of bad movie that is devoid of any redeeming qualities. Outright terrible, but in a competent enough way that you can’t just point and laugh at it like The Room, or something in that vein. 

Instead it just speeds along, a constant barrage of baffling choices that seem specifically created to be as un-engaging as possible to a normal person that hasn’t read the books, but also actively insulting to those that have. And you know me, I don’t mind things changing in the process of adapting a book into a movie. The Lord of the Rings trilogy generally does a great job of this. Even in the spots where I don’t personally like the changes (Why is Gimli like that?), I can still at least see the vision. 

Eragon is the exact opposite. Within the first few scenes you get bizarre pronunciation changes, completely new motivations for certain characters, visual redesigns for every non-human, and man, it just sucks. Why don’t the Urgals have horns? There’s a single Elf in this movie, you really couldn’t be bothered to just give her pointy ears? 

And speaking of weird choices for character designs, why does this Dragon have feathers? Also, why does she grow from a baby the size of a large dog into an adult the size of a bus after being thrown into the air and struck by lightning? Again, none of this would really matter that much if the movie was actually solid as its own thing. Playing things safer to keep within budget or adding some extra bird-like flair to a flying lizard so that they stand out more from the standard design of a dragon is fine. The problem is that as a normal movie you can just go out and watch without any prior knowledge, it’s also a trainwreck. 

The single biggest issue is the pacing. The book is around 500 pages in total, which isn’t too crazy for a fantasy novel at face value. But it turns out that you can fit an absolutely absurd amount of plot into that space. Remember, the prose here is simple, this isn’t like a Tolkien book where 100 of those pages are descriptions of trees. There’s an absolutely massive amount of plot relevant scenes that you sorta have to include for the story to make sense, and very little of it can be condensed down. 

The end result is a movie that has literally no room to breathe. Scenes end the instant that a character finishes a sentence. You’ll get an establishing shot that is desperately trying to mimic the vibes of the LotR, but it gets cut off before you can really settle into the scenery. And unlike something like Spider-Man 3, which also moves as fast as physically possible through a jam-packed plot full of wacky hi-jinks, for Eragon it’s all in service of a fairly predictable story without any real twists or turns. 

I could go on forever about all the little things that the movie gets wrong, but this is already a long enough post. Instead, here’s my pitch for a way to rewrite / restructure this abomination into something more sensible. Fair warning, this will deal with spoilers and also be sorta unintelligible if you haven’t read the books:

Eragon

(Da Movie)

(*but hopefully a little bit better this time)

First things first, the story being told in the first book is too long for a single movie. If anything is going to have any room to breathe we have to either remove a massive amount of plot or cut things off early, and I would vastly prefer the latter. I think having things end after Murtagh and Saphira rescue Eragon and Arya from Gil’ead would be a fun way to structure it. There’s more than enough plot to fill out a full movie up until that point and you still get to end things on a high stakes action sequence with Saphira tearing off the roof of the prison. 

If we’re to follow a normal 3 act structure, the first would cover Eragon finding the egg, Saphira hatching, etc, with things capping off with the Ra’zac attacking Carvahall and killing Garrow. Then the middle chunk is all of the adventures with Brom, ending with his death. Then the final third is Eragon and Murtagh traveling to Gil’ead along with the prison break. Fleshing out their time together is always something I wish more of a focus was placed on, it’s glossed over pretty quickly even in the books. 

Since you’re no longer sprinting through plot beats to make it to Farthen Dûr in under 2 hours, the pace should be significantly easier to keep under control. With that extra time we can maybe get to see Roran for more than a few seconds, and have him leave for Therinsford on his own instead of completely ruining future continuity by leaving with Katrina. 

Leaving out Teirm seems like a good call given how far out of the way it is, but I would instead include Dras-Leona. Eragon and Brom could find the Seithr Oil in Carvahall and bee-line it there, running into the massacre at Yazuac on the way. Instead of following the book continuity of them making it out of Dras-Leona then getting ambushed at night, I’d have Brom just get injured sacrificing himself in the initial escape, with them running into Murtagh on the way out.

To pad out the last third, I’d have Eragon run into Angela on the way up to Gil’ead. I think her recognizing Murtagh but keeping that realization to herself would be a fun little change, given how little they interact over the course of the series normally. This could also happen relatively soon after Brom’s death, with Angela’s fortunetelling pointing them to Gil’ead to find Arya instead of the gang just sorta going that way on a hunch. 

We’d keep Eragon getting captured and imprisoned by Durza from the books, with the escape sequence taking a little bit longer to feel like a proper climax. Things would end after Eragon communicates with Arya, setting things up for the next movie to begin with the group traveling to Farthen Dûr. 

Is this a perfect movie, even on paper? No, absolutely not. But I definitely think it would be an improvement. There’s a truly astounding amount of baffling choices (“I suffer without my stone”, the wacky dragon vision gimmick, Dwarves existing but being played by normal human sized dudes, etc) in the film we got. And at the end of the day it really just bums me out more than anything. 

The books deserved so much better. There are a ton of small things that I love about the series that I couldn’t find a natural spot to mention in this post. Like, Roran being insanely good at defending his mind from mental attacks because he’s just that much of a wife guy, or how interesting everything about Elva is. “Oops my blessing was actually a curse because I’m bad at grammar” is such a smart way to create a character.

I’m gonna go read Eldest. Have a great day!