Seeker doesn't find originality

October 8, 2007 —

With fantasy movies, there's always the possibility of something extraordinary - a new, immersive, and more fantastic world than our familiar one. Unfortunately, most movies in the genre, such as The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, end up portraying a world that is in fact more mediocre than ours.

Alexander Ludwig plays 14-year-old Will Stanton, one of many siblings in an American family which has moved to the United Kingdom. As the movie opens, school is being let out for winter break. Will, wishing for snow on his fourteenth birthday, gets more than he bargained for as he is thrust into a world of magic and, as it turns out, predictability.

After Will attends a holiday dinner at their nearby mansion, circumstances force Merriman Lyon (Ian McShane) and Miss Greythorne (Frances Conroy) to reveal his true destiny to him. As it turns out, Will is "The Seeker," the seventh son of a seventh son, and, like Lyon and Greythorne, one of the Old Ones who exist outside of time. Wait a minute. If Will exists outside of time, how did his body mature to the age of 14? The Seeker doesn't bother to explain logical stumbling block, like this.

As The Seeker, Will is able to notice certain fractals (which always look the same in the movie) in the environment which somehow trigger a shift through time. After going through time, Will is able to locate one of six items which grant him power. This is important because, as the title suggests, the dark is rising, and Will is the representative of the light.

Do we really need yet another story in which the protagonist thinks he or she is an ordinary person, but turns out to be the destined savior of the world? I don't think so. It's a necessity that if this most cliched of all cliched plot devices is to be used, something notable must be done to set it apart from the others of its kind, or else it just falls in line as another default fantasy.

It's tradition, it seems, for mediocre fantasy stories, in film or print, to rip off at least five aspects of The Lord of the Rings. The five The Seeker chooses are the dark rider, an evildoer controlling the weather, birds used as agents of the dark, small items of great power, and a crystal ball that allows one to see something not physically present.

I found it hard to empathize with Will. Maybe it was the acting, or maybe it just isn't believable when a young teen takes on lofty themes involving the end of the world.

Also, I had some beef with the Old Ones who were supposed to be his guardians. They're around to help in the beginning of the movie, and then they just take a back seat when major events start happening. If you were the guardian of the most important person in the world, wouldn't you at least be in his vicinity, so that you could, you know, guard him?

I thought the Old Ones were the most interesting characters, too, especially Dawson (James Cosmo) and Old George (Jim Piddock). They looked like ordinary men a person might spot in a small town. It seemed to me that part of the method for presenting the world of The Seeker involves showing that ordinary things might not be as they seem. The characters of Dawson and Old George are sterling examples of this, but they are painfully absent for most of the runtime.

Another thing that was apparent was this movie was cut to pieces. This is unsurprising in a 94-minute movie based on a book, but why even bother making a movie based on a book if there isn't enough runtime available to do it justice? On the other hand, I don't think I'd be interested in watching three hours of this.