Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
10/6/07
First, and most importantly,
I should point out that before seeing ads for The Seeker: The
Dark is Rising, I'd never read or even heard of Susan Cooper's acclaimed
series of fantasy novels. Since seeing the movie, I've done a bit
of googling about them, and they sound like solid, well-developed fantasy
tales. Alas, the first (and likely last) film adaptation is a disastrous
shell that drops names of characters, forces and objects but lacks her
(or anyone else's) plot, themes, or logic. Limping sadly through
95 heavily-edited minutes, it trots out a pair of professional performances
and a few competent special effects but mostly keeps checking to see if
we understood its' random, silly mythology the first twenty times it was
explained.
Will Stanton (Alexander Ludwig)
is an American kid living in England with his large, vaguely English family
we're assured are all Americans. He's got a crush on New Girl at
School Maggie Barnes (Amelia Warner) and a 14th birthday right around the
corner. That's when things start to get strange. He begins
to see spinning spirals in the air when around certain objects and is detained
at the mall by a couple of security guards who give him the Agent Smith
treatment and then turn into flocks of crows. He's approached by
a group of four older people who live at the Greythorne mansion outside
of town. There's Miss Greythorne (Frances Conroy), her butler Merriman
Lyon (Ian McShane) and handimen Dawson (James Cosmo) and George (Jim Piddock).
They are the Old Ones, a group of ageless supernatural folks who represent
The Light against The Dark, personified by The Rider (Christopher Eccleston).
It seems that, well, The Dark is Rising, and in just five short days, The
Rider will possess the power to flood the world with darkness and evil
(a quick, snappy montage shows smoky clouds overrunning and destroying
both London and New York City). Only Will can stop him, by using
The Powers He Never Knew He Had to gather six “signs” that hold the power
of The Light. He is... The Seeker.
Did you get that? Because
if you didn't, Merriman will be happy to explain it to you again.
And again. And again. Plus, The Rider always enjoys updating
other characters on the story's progress: “I've got three days and
he's already found three signs!” I'd swear that half of the dialog
handed to the movie's two best actors involves recapping the random and
pointless rules that govern the movie's plot. Having stripped Cooper's
rules of all their mythological underpinnings and sense (I'm sure it plays
a lot better in the books when the “signs” are actually signs of something,
rather than here where the name is kind of like me calling my toaster a
Sign), those rules are best not given much thought, particularly since
if you hear even once what the mysterious nature of Sign #6 is, you could
save Will some time by telling him exactly where it is. Of course,
he's got powers other than just sign-seeking: super-strength and
flame-throwing among them, but they're just inserted to make him seem cooler.
He does exactly nothing with these non-literary powers, even when they'd
seem really useful, like summoning some fire when The Rider plunges England
into a massive snowstorm.
About that snowstorm... it
may be the most continuity-challenged natural disaster ever in a major
studio release. At times, it's so intense that it throws objects
through the air and smashes windows. At others, it's just a nice
winter snow, and in other shots, there's no snow on the ground at all.
The production honestly seems to have run out of money at some point, with
many scenes assembled in the editing room with close-ups of eyes, dialog
from unseen speakers and swirling camera moves covering up the fact that
we're not really seeing anything. This is most pronounced at the
climax, the moment when it's most important that we actually DO see something.
Most of Eccleston's dialog in the last half hour comes either off-screen
or while his mouth is closed. If we're to think he communicates telepathically
with Will, this is never established.
Even the action sequences
we get to see are lame as all get-out, particularly a pitiful trip to an
ancient church (Will and the Old Ones travel through time, if I forgot
to mention that) where an old woman aligned with The Dark turns into a
boatload of snakes. While Will searches a basement for that elusive
Sign, we see shots of the Old Ones upstairs wrapped head to toe in snakes,
saying things like “Hurry, Will! Find the Sign!” over and over.
It's laughably unexciting. Elsewhere, there must be a lot of paperwork
involved in that five day process of building up the power to destroy the
world, because The Rider spends most of the movie off-screen and never
seems to think of how easy it would be to just follow Will around or do
something really crazy like try to kill him. He does show up at Will's
house once pretending to be a Doctor (since Eccleston played The Doctor
on Doctor Who, this gave me my one moment of real entertainment while watching
the movie because, well, I'm a geek) and threatens him a few times, but
overall the Harbinger of The End Times seems pretty content to sit on a
park bench and let things take care of themselves. There are also
a few skeletons in the Stanton family closet, revolving around a paper
his physics professor father (John Benjamin Hickey) was writing when Will's
parents... kinda lost track of his never-before mentioned twin brother.
This leads to a scene where Will claims he was “just curious” about whether
“The Dark can hurt you” while his father discourages his interest saying
all this talk is “boring” that may be the worst exchange between two characters
hiding their knowledge of the supernatural from each other ever committed
to film.
If it seems like I'm just
firing off random objections to The Seeker, you're right.
Almost every moment of the film is wrong: weak, lame, silly, incoherent
or otherwise just “off”. While they never do “hook up” in any way,
Alexander Ludwig (either 15 or 16 depending upon which source I check)
and 25 year-old Amelia Warner make creepily mismatched love interests.
McShane and Eccleston proudly display the British Theater Tradition of
giving every role you're best regardless of its' quality, but most of the
cast is helpless against their silly material. The story is a mess,
slogging from one setpiece to another while characters plotting or opposing
the End of The World remain ridiculously passive. For all the time
spent updating the count of Days vs. Signs, no one even asks AT WHAT TIME
The Rider gains the ability to end the world. Midnight? Dawn?
Dusk? 2:17 PM? And don't count on John Hodge's screenplay to
redeem itself with dialog like “I'm supposed to save the world? I
don't even know how to talk to a girl!”
The Seeker: The
Dark is Rising is one of the worst films of the year. I'll take
my solace in having not read the source material: take yours in spending
your eight bucks on something else. I'm sure Susan Cooper's well-regarded
book is available in paperback for less. |
