Stay True to the Story
The Walden Media film adaptation of Susan Cooper’s “The Dark is Rising”, ultimately renamed “The Seeker”, has seemingly flopped with critics and is doing badly at the box-office. While I would like to claim that the reason is due to their decision to remove all pre-Christian references from the work, the most likely culprit is the fact that they didn’t respect the original story.
“‘The Seeker’ is based on the young adult novels written in the 1960s and ’70s by Susan Cooper. Lyrical, magical and steeped in Celtic mythology, Cooper’s beloved series seems like ripe material for audiences hungry for magic and epochal battles between good and evil. But screenwriter John Hodge strips Cooper’s story of its details and charm, reducing it to a kind of characterless, elemental video game – an apocalyptic scavenger hunt punctuated by sonorous pronouncements instead of dialogue: “You and all your kind will be destroyed,” intones The Rider (Christopher Eccleston), the leader of The Dark.”
While author Susan Cooper admits that you “do violence to a book to make it into a screenplay”
* Check out my exclusive interview with Herne the Hunter on why he ultimately decided to drop out of filming “The Seeker”.
4 responses so far
And every time I hear someone wail, “They ruined the book!”, I’m going to quote Stephen King, who often heard the same thing said about the movie adaptations of his books.
He’d point to his bookshelf, where all the books were lined up, and say, “No they didn’t. They’re just fine, all sitting right there.”
one hopes that the message has been firmly telegraphed: stay true to the story.
Frankly, given the Hollywood mentality, the message they get will more likely be “fantasy is over”…
all i had to see was the trailer to know it was an insult to anyone who enjoyed the original books. really, i think it was the worst cinematic adaptation of a fantasy novel series that i have ever seen, and i’ve seen plenty. i even liked both films adapted from “war of the worlds” even though they depart so drastically from that great literary work.
sometimes it seems hollywood film producers are out to live up to the stereotype of them as brainless, bloodsucking cretins who wouldn’t know entertainment if it shot them in the face. i know there are many film producers in hollywood who are principled patrons of the arts, but sadly they don’t have the deepest pockets.
[...] The Dark is Rising. I actively avoided this movie when it was released, because I’d seen the news that it was deliberately being purged of ‘pagan’ references. Since those same pagan references being a key component of the storyline, I didn’t care to [...]