The Dark Wins
NOOOOOOOOO!
I know it's only a movie. I never expected it to be right, exactly. I know they only bought it to jump on the bandwagon after Narnia and HP. But if those producers were willing to at least attempt to stay close to the source characters, WHY MUST THEY MURDER MY DARK IS RISING!
THEY MADE THE STANTONS AMERICANS!!!! And bratty, hateful and stereotypes! Yes, it's Will the nerd, his no-doubt obnoxious Hollywood little sister and a passle of dumb, grungy brothers who push him around under the nose of their cold, distant parents (why would cold, distant academics decide to have 6 children? well, at least it's not 9, I guess...).
God knows why they've even bothered to set it in England. Oh right--it's easy enough to change an English family for an American family fake Hollywood pod!family, but trying to find actually mythology other than the one given in the book would be difficult. Though I'm sure somebody tried ("Why can't we just set the Arthurian history in America?") to do that.
I'm usually the first person to consider the filmmaker's pov, but in this case the filmmaker's pov is all too obvious. And it's unfortunate because I think at least a lot of the recent adaptations of fantasy and kids' books, even when they made changes, were understood to be tapping into a love of the books themselves. Obviously with this they thought the books weren't big enough to care about or trust the characters, so it got the Hollywood treatment and when it fails they'll blame the books.
I know it's only a movie. I never expected it to be right, exactly. I know they only bought it to jump on the bandwagon after Narnia and HP. But if those producers were willing to at least attempt to stay close to the source characters, WHY MUST THEY MURDER MY DARK IS RISING!
THEY MADE THE STANTONS AMERICANS!!!! And bratty, hateful and stereotypes! Yes, it's Will the nerd, his no-doubt obnoxious Hollywood little sister and a passle of dumb, grungy brothers who push him around under the nose of their cold, distant parents (why would cold, distant academics decide to have 6 children? well, at least it's not 9, I guess...).
God knows why they've even bothered to set it in England. Oh right--it's easy enough to change an English family for an American family fake Hollywood pod!family, but trying to find actually mythology other than the one given in the book would be difficult. Though I'm sure somebody tried ("Why can't we just set the Arthurian history in America?") to do that.
I'm usually the first person to consider the filmmaker's pov, but in this case the filmmaker's pov is all too obvious. And it's unfortunate because I think at least a lot of the recent adaptations of fantasy and kids' books, even when they made changes, were understood to be tapping into a love of the books themselves. Obviously with this they thought the books weren't big enough to care about or trust the characters, so it got the Hollywood treatment and when it fails they'll blame the books.