Shannon and I went to see Eragon tonight. Yes, we paid money for it. Yes, we regret that. We actually got a lot more laughs and conversation out of the movie than most we see, so for that reason, it was worth it. The movie, however, was terrible. That is honestly the best possible rating I can give it: terrible. The actors were anywhere from decent to awful, and the depictions of the different people was laughable. Movies always make changes to books. They often have to; it's a different medium for story telling. But I almost couldn't keep a straight face through the movie. Various groups are important to the story line of the book: the Varden, dwarfs, Urgals and elves. The Varden come out looking like bad stereotypes of African warriors, the dwarfs are mentioned only once in the movie (in passing) though there are some bearded men which appear on screen in the places where there are supposed to be dwarfs. But since they never speak, aren't referred to and all seem to be about 5'7" I can only guess that they might be dwarfs. The Urgals are the non-human horned bad guys in the book, but for the movie they seem to have decided that it was better to just cast all the guys from the Capital One commercials. Finally the elves. They aren't in the movie either. In fact, the one character in the book who is an elf is never said to be so. Doesn't even have pointy ears.

It's a pity. The book is quite good. I recommend it. But they decided to go make drastic changes (I could go on and on) and get bad actors and compress it down to an hour and 39 minutes. Luckily, you needn't worry about any more movies (though there are at least 2 books after Eragon) because they didn't develop any of the plot necessary to lead into the second book, or make anyone want to see a second movie.

Additional beefs left out for space: "Dragon vision", Brom's death, the Raz'ac, Murtagh's scar, Saphira's growth, etc.