The basic plot of ERAGON has the title farm boy living in an oppressed kingdom named Alagaesia (Isn't that a hand lotion?) ruled over by an evil tyrant named Galbatorix (Isn't that a laxative?), the last of the dragonriders, who gained power by betraying and wiping out all the other dragonriders. A beautiful princess named Arya has stolen a stone from Lord Galbatorix, teleporting it away to a nearby forest moments before being captured by Galbatorix's evil warlock, Durza, who looks like the lovechild of Marilyn Manson and the lipstick-wearing henchman from the first D&D movie. Young Eragon will come across the stone and take it home, only for it to soon hatch into a baby dragon that zaps him with a magic light, bonding him to her as its rider; the bond symbolized via a serpentine scar on his hand. The dragon quickly grows and via psychic communication, introduces herself as Saphira. It turns out there's a surviving ex-dragonrider named Brom, who has been living undercover as a peasant ever since Galbatorix took power. He finds out about the boy and his dragon and goes about teaching him the ways of the dragonrider and learning how to wield magic by learning the various elvish words for stuff to be used in spells. They embark on a quest to reach this far off region where the rebel forces that oppose Galbatorix's evil empire dwell, all the while repeatedly telling young Eragon about he's the new hope that the forces of good have been waiting for.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Now I fully realize that I'm not really the target audience for this film. It's clearly aimed at 10-year old boys, preferably 10-year old boys that have never seen STAR WARS, LORD OF THE RINGS, DRAGONHEART, DRAGONSLAYER, THE SWORD IN THE STONE, THE BLACK CAULDRON, THE BEASTMASTER, or any of countless other fantasy films that this tale borrows heavily from; or at least are too young and optimistic to notice or care that what they're watching doesn't have a single original or imaginative moment in its entire running time. You can't discount my increasing disinterest with ERAGON to my being too old for the juvenile nature of the material since I've enjoyed other more imaginative kiddy entertainment like the Harry Potter flicks. No, my increasing disinterest with the story of ERAGON stemmed from a profound sense of "been there, done that." Just the similarities to STAR WARS EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE is enough to make one cry plagiarism.

Eragon = Eragon Skywalker
Brom = Obi Brom Kenobi
Princess Arya = Princess Arya
Lord Galbatorix = Emperor Galbatorix
Durza = Durza Vader
Saphira = A living, breathing, talking lightsaber

The movie even features scenes where the young farm boy gazes at the setting sun, comes home to find his home in tatters and his uncle murdered, a late second act storming of and escape from an enemy stronghold to rescue a captured princess, the introduction of a dashing rogue to assist the hero, and a finale built around the young hero coming into his own just in time to save the rebel base from certain destruction. Only things missing are two jabbering droids, a wookie, and a Deathstar.

Yeah, not only have I seen this movie before, I've already seen its special edition too!

Durza even commands a horde of big, burly, bald, goateed men that look as if they'd never heard of water, let alone soap. I forget what they were called in the movie; I suggested calling them "baldbarians." They might as well have been called Imperial Stormtroopers since that's what their role was.

Aside from the unoriginality factor, ERAGON isn't an especially well made movie either. The next five paragraphs provide five perfect examples of how it goes quite wrong:

The film opens with the mandatory fantasy flick voiceover telling us how there was a time when dragonriders protected the lands until the evil dragonrider Galbatorix betrayed them, wiped them out, and made himself Lord over the kingdom. I'd reckon about ten minutes in Jeremy Irons begins telling villages the same exact backstory; some of what he says is almost verbatim what was explained in the opening narration. Either the makers of ERAGON didn't trust the Jeremy Irons' soliloquy scene to fill in the backstory or the record started to skip. A movie really shouldn't repeat itself like that, especially that early on.

Saphira has just hatched and we get a few touchingly cute scenes involving the hatchling and Eragon, the only time the boy and his dragon have any sort of chemistry together. Within minutes we see Eragon and a noticeably larger Saphira running through a field. Saphira takes flight. Eragon experiences a magical surge from his hand scar and then we see Saphira undergo an in-flight transformation from still a small dragon to a full grown dragon. Saphira returns to Eragon and begins communicating in the voice of Rachel Weisz (another element that just didn't work for me). Now I've never read the book so I don't know how much the makers of the movie changed or left out, but it was impossible to not see this instantaneous transformation as the filmmakers’ way of skipping over a few chapters. It felt unnaturally spontaneous story-wise.

Durza conjures up these undead assassins that Brom keeps talking up as being so dangerous they'd have no chance against them if they ever encountered them. Eragon, Saphira, and Brom due have an encounter with them, one in which they easily dispatch with these unstoppable supernatural killing machines.

Eragon spies two of those rotting assassins interrogating a shopkeeper into telling them about seeing Eragon with the stone/egg. Eragon decides that he must go warn his uncle before the assassins show up. Saphira swoops in and sweeps up Eragon to prevent the assassins from finding him right then and there. His first dragon ride does not go all that well before being dropped off at his farm home. In the course of a sequence that lasted all of about a minute, night turned to day and the assassins had already made it from the town to Eragon's home out in the Shire, trashed the place, and killed his uncle? That's record timing.

Durza uses his magic to send Eragon a dream in which Princess Arya pleads with him to come rescue her. Eragon is determined to do so despite pleas from both Brom and Saphira. Eragon arrives, it turns out to be a trap, and right as Eragon is about to be killed by a flying spear, Brom suddenly teleports into the shot to take the fatal blow meant for our young hero. Uh, how the hell did he get there so damn fast? This place was untold miles away from their camp; Eragon needed a flying dragon to get there in a decent amount of time. Did Brom's horse suddenly sprout wings or learn to run at lightspeed? Hey, maybe Brom captured one of those undead assassins and rode it to the stronghold?

The departure of Jeremy Irons around the one hour mark proves doubly unfortunate since his character and performance is the only one with any real weight to it. The moment he dies, so does the film's soul. It's enough to make you wish you watching a movie about him as the aging dragonrider making a comeback to save his kingdom - sort of a sword & sorcery ROCKY BALBOA.

The story even keeps tacking on extra characters as it sprints to the finish line and none of them come with any sort of development outside of a basic explanation as to why they exist in the first place. Singer Joss Stone cameos as a fortune teller, as if Eragon by that point in the story really needed a fortune teller to inform him that much danger and greatness awaited him. He eventually is allied with another young man, the son of another evil dragonrider slain by Brom ages ago, looking to make good for his father's misdeeds. I suppose this young kid could be seen as the roguish Han Solo type, just minus Solo's reluctance to get involved. And then Djimon Hounsou pops up as the Moor-ish resistance leader, Ajihad, which I think is evlish for "token black character".

Hold on a sec... The film's only minority character, a black man, dressed in garb reminiscent of a Muslim warrior from the Middle Ages is named "a jihad?" Umm... At least he's a good guy; I guess.

The year 2006 opened with an Academy Award winning British actor giving the worst of performance of his career playing an evil warlord in a lame fantasy flick and now it closes with an Academy Award winning British actor giving the worst of performance of his career playing an evil warlord in a lame fantasy flick. John Malkovich does fare better than Ben Kinglsey did in BLOODRAYNE if only because Malkovich actually bothered to show up to the set as opposed to Kingsley who only sent his body to the set while his metaphysical being enjoyed a nice holiday in the Alps. Malkovich also has the benefit of only having about two minutes of screen time. John Malkovich's contributions to ERAGON as the evil Lord Galbatorix can be summarized in six sentences:

"Bring me the stone."
"Bring me the rider."
"Kill the rider."
"Why didn't you kill the rider?"
"This time you better kill the rider."
"RRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Galbatorix resides in Snake Mountain - he times-shares with Skeletor - so that he can gaze upon a map of his kingdom, bark orders at Durza, and prattles on once or twice about how this new dragonrider must be eliminated ASAP before he brings hope to the people. Now that I think about it; Durza's really more like Darth Maul was in THE PHANTOM MENACE. I still can't bring myself to give Darth Vader status to Lord Galbatorix due to his being an almost non-entity in this chapter of the story outside of everyone always talking about him. Galbatorix is sorta like the Wizard of Oz that nobody wants to visit see.

In case you weren't aware, ERAGON is intended to be the first chapter in a trilogy. Is it just me or has the concept of making a movie trilogy become a bad cliché. Why bother telling a complete story in the first chapter since it'll all flesh out over the course of the next two films, assuming this first one does well enough to warrant the making of the next one. The original STAR WARS trilogy was able to pull this off because you got a satisfying, self-contained story even though it left certain cliffhangers dangling. They left you wanting more. The LORD OF THE RINGS movies were able to get away with this because you still had three hours of story, character development, and action before the first two films reached a stopping point. ERAGON, however, does not pull this off - not even close. You are left wanting more but not in an "I can't wait to see what happens next" sort of way. You want more originality, more imagination, more emotion, more action, and more adventure, more of the stuff that's supposed to make you want to see another installment.

Characters are merely archetypes, emotional resonance is not there, and not a whole heck of a lot really happens when you get right down to it. The grand finale is the only time the film ever comes close to being rousing, what with Eragon decked out in his finest DUNE disco wear for the final showdown aerial dogfight with Durza and his flying whateveritwas that looked like a crossbreeding of a bat, a shark, and the Smog Monster.

If anything ERAGON proves the flat earth theory to be true. Everything about this film is flat. The performances are flat, the dialogue is flat, the action scenes are flat, the relationships between the characters are flat - I'd finish this by saying the humor is also flat but that would require this film to actually have some humor. I don't think I've ever seen a fantasy film geared towards juvenile audiences that was this humorless. To be fair, ERAGON is not a completely terrible film. But, boy, is it a mediocre one. To call it lackluster and unfulfilling would be an understatement. Anyone know the elvish word for lame?

NEW RULE FOR FANTASY FILMMAKERS: From now on you're only allowed a maximum of three sweeping vista shots of mountainous landscapes per film. Anything else and your officially a scenery whore.