Eragon was a disappointment.
First off, I hate it when an untried director is called upon to direct a project that is so out of their league. The director, in this case Stefan Fangmeier--whose only prior directing experience was as the blue screen second unit director on Galaxy Quest, and Dreamcatcher--was definitely not up to the job in this case.
Only Jeremy Irons gave a performance worthy of the movie this should have been, and that was probably more due to the fact that he is that damn good, than anything else. John Malkovitch, on the other hand, was probably handicapped by the fact that he had so little to do in the film that he was never able to get into any groove to give his character any real emotion or presence.
The second thing that ticked me off is that the movie didn't have a budget big enough to create what I imagine the producers/studio were hoping for, a movie that could be ranked with LOTR and Harry Potter (epic movies based on a popular series of books). This is probably why they went with Fangmeier as director, Peter (Jurassic Park 3) Buchman as screen writer, and Patrick Doyle to score the movie (Doyle's not bad, but I don't rank all that high either). It would seem that the budget was probably spent to produce a dragon that didn't suck like Sony's Godzilla (better known as 'Zilla, or Jira, to the Godzilla prideful) which could only be brought out in the rain or at night.
Thirdly, the movie was dull and boring--and this, I would imagine, was due more to the screen writer's poor work than the director's poor directing. The pacing was slow and dull. There was not enough exposition in areas that needed them, and too much in areas that didn't. And the battles weren't exiting because we were never really involved and the staging wasn't all that great.
When the movie finally ended, I didn't have the same emotional reaction I had at the end of movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter for that matter. And it's that feeling that makes a person, well at least it does me, want to come back to the next chapter of the movie. But it wasn't there when as the final scenes played out and it went to credits.
It's sad to think that this could have probably been a great movie following what we've seen can be done, but in the end I would rate this slightly higher than Dungeons and Dragons: the movie, and some of my less-than-stellar role playing sessions.
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