In a time of claptrap, in a land of balderdash, a child will come to spread confusion and boredom throughout the land.
The Dark Is Rising *
Directed by David L Cunningham. Starring Christopher Eccleston, Ian McShane, Alexander Ludwig, Gregory Smith, Amelia Warner, 12A cert, gen release, 94 min
A visit to the internet suggests that readers of Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising chronicles - and, indeed, Ms Cooper herself - are faintly outraged by the liberties taken with the original story in this profoundly useless big-screen adaptation.
When a fantasy movie tears apart a source novel in this manner, the film-makers usually have a general audience in mind. The thinking tends to be as follows: let's discretely tidy away the extraneous strands of ersatz mythology and deliver a lean plot that any fool can understand.
With that in mind, The Dark Is Rising must be accounted a galloping failure on eight levels (or so). Despite the novel being so ruthlessly gutted, the script (by John Hodge of Trainspotting fame) remains as dizzyingly incomprehensible to the layperson as the later discourses of Søren Kierkegaard.
The film has something to do with a child (Alexander Ludwig) who is chosen to stand up for the forces of Light (I think this means Good) against Dark (Not So Good) by a gang of slumming character actors led by Ian McShane and Frances Conroy. Time travel comes into it somewhere, as do poor special effects, awful costumes and consistently ropey performances from people who should know better. The story is, however, mostly taken up with the search for a series of mystical signs.
"Give me the sign," Christopher Eccleston's sinister Rider says repeatedly. I'm giving to it to you now Chris. So are Susan Cooper and all the book's fans. Can you tell what it means?
