Earthsea

It never ceases to amaze me how some hack screenwriter can think he's gifted enough to take award-winning, much-loved source material and alter it nearly to the point of unrecognizability. This can never lead to a good outcome. This miniseries was further proof. What a complete waste of time and money. Stilted, wooden acting, lame dialogue, and pointless major plot changes (not to mention detail changes) resulted in one of the worst book-to-film adaptations I've ever seen. Several times I found myself wondering whether the people responsible for this mess had ever actually read the books. And what was up with the casting? I've never seen a bigger load of actors who are simply wrong for their parts.

How do they get funding for this stuff? I just don't get it. They should just give me the money instead -- I could have made a better adaptation with my video camera, a plastic swimming pool, and a stick of modeling clay. Unbelievable.

Two-thirds through last night's show--the first half of EARTHSEA--I muttered to my wife, "This is so bad." She said, "So tomorrow you'll be at the computer typing up your gripes to someone." I looked at her indignantly and said something like, "Ah, why waste my time?" Of course, she was right, so here I am. An Earthsea adaptation is long overdue; I'm just so sad that it was done so shabbily, with such an eye (apparently) toward anticipating what the unimaginative masses would like to see, as opposed to the rich, subtle, mystical world that Ursula Le Guin so beautifully created in her great Earthsea novels. I don't have the heart (or time) to break the mini-series down, bit by bit, to show what's wrong with it. Let's just say that the screenwriters, producers, and director insisted on reshaping a great work of popular art into a cookie cutter shape, substituting clichés for subtleties and an "epic" (read Lord of the Rings) war story for what should have been a personal struggle with good/evil. Worst, I suspect that in Part II, tonight, we're all gonna see Ged, whose little cheek scar only adds to his overall "hotness," smooching a princess (the SMALLVILLE babe). This thing is almost as bland as last month's elections. Mr and Ms. Producers, either do Le Guin justice and tell the story right or don't bother!

What I saw was not Earthsea. This was so loosely based on the first two novels that I am shocked that they could still call it Earthsea. But, I do understand that they can call it whatever they want.

They even went so far as to make Ged his public name and Sparrowhawk his secret name. I guess they felt Sparrowhawk sounded better in echo then Ged.

And who's dumb idea was it to add the evil king? They took out all the cool stuff like the battle with the dragons of pendor and filled with stuff that was never in the book.

After all, what did the foolish author know?

Sci-Fi has once again trashed someone else's work.

I recommend you read Ursula K. Le Guin's comments at this site. http://slate.msn.com/id/2111107/

To be fair, "The Legend of Earthsea" isn't horrible. It crisply adapts Le Guin's powerful novels in a way that is adequate for a Sci-Fi Movie-of-The-Week. However, it clearly lacks the power of Sci-Fi's more hyped projects, like "Children of Dune" or "Battlestar Galataca". Thus, the results are stacked somewhere between adequate and mediocre.

The main problem with the production lies in that the show's producers evidently see the relation between Le Guin's Earthsea and the landmarks of fantastical fiction that followed it. Most notably, the Rourke School of Wizardry obviously draws a connection to Harry Potter's Hogwarts. (Take note, the first Earthsea book was written in 1968, so there is hardly a chance Le Guin is infringing on any actual Rowling territory). Immediately picking up on this, the movie depicts Jasper, the school rival of the protagonist Ged, as a carbon copy of Draco Malfoy - the blonde aristocrat with a constantly snobbish demeanor. This just isn't how it went in the original novel. In Leguin's "A Wizard of Earthsea", Jasper was one of Ged's friend who eventually outgrew the young wizard, eventually picking on Ged in order to appease the older crowd he hung out with. But "Legend of Earthsea" clearly makes Jasper out to be a clear-cut foil instead of a three dimensional character.

Other changes include making the barbaric Kargs more or less the stereotypical "evil kingdom", complete with an evil king with plans of . . . yes . .. world domination. He actually says "All of Earthsea will be mine!" Please. To paraphrase Le Guin, she wrote about "real people with real problems in imaginary places". The movie clearly undercuts such intentions, making a story that is only devoid of Le Guin's social statements on race and gender roles. In addition, the many original insights that haunted Le Guin's passages only lingers weakly in the frames of this soon-to-be-forgotten bumble.

**

I am a huge fan of the Earthsea books and have been since the 1970s. I was so excited to hear the books were being adapted into a mini-series, particularly now with the CGI possibilities out there. To say this was a huge disappointment is the understatement of my year. Unlike some, my dismay is not because they changed the story from the books - screen adaptations do that all the time, sometimes to an extreme degree like here. But for that kind of adaptation to be good, you still need good casting, good writing, good acting, and good direction. There was none of that here.

Even my husband, who is not a fan of the books, didn't want to keep watching it (we tuned out after about 45 minutes and then looked in twice more for about two minutes each), purely because the script was so wooden (oh, for the lyricism of Le Guin's original prose!) and the line reading by the actors was so poor - it was like watching a high school play without a breakout star. They took what was a subtle, UNIQUE (the operative word to the max) series of books and made it grotesquely derivative - heartbreaking, given how truly original Le Guin's world was. She had no Sauron or Voldemort equivalent in her books (think about it, you fans of the books) - her whole point was there is only the evil that men do. In her Earthsea, no one is completely evil but everyone is capable of evil acts (even Ged). But obviously Hollywood can only deal with external, black and white conflicts - and so it had to invent a big bad villain (with only a glancing association with an original Le Guin character). I started out very nervous about this, because Ged was cast with blond curly hair - but I couldn't have possibly imagined how profoundly awful it would be.

Please, everyone who is reading and writing these comments - don't blame Le Guin. This mini-series has virtually NOTHING to do with her books.