This past weekend I went with my best friend to see the movie Eragon. I had previously read the book that it was based on my friend had not, but we are both big fantasy people. We both came out of it with identical conclusions; the dialogue was awful and the film was in every conceivable way inferior to the Chronicles of Narnia to say nothing of Lord of the Rings. That being said we both enjoyed the film and I recommended it to my father as his sort of move. (You run into the bad guys, you run away from the bad guys and everybody lives happily ever after.) I think part of the reason why we were so positive about the film was that we were playing mystery science theater 3000 together. Besides for that the acting in of itself was actually quite good and there were a number of really cool scenes. Despite having an absolutely lousy script the actors managed to put together characters who were likable and engaging.
From what I have read, Fox spent over $100 million on this film. It has taken in around $30 million in its first week so it seems fair to say that it is heading to be a major box office flop. This raises the question of who gave the green light for this production? Especially since, as I mentioned earlier, the problem with Eragon is that it features one of the worst screenplays in the history of modern fantasy. In making a film the first thing one needs, at least in theory, is a script. That comes before putting actors in front of a camera, costomes and special effects. That means that someone at Fox looked at this script and said: let us invest $100 million on this.