I recently saw The Seeker: The Dark is Rising despite reviews on Netflix warning me away. It was very bad. I have a feeling that even if I had never read the book (which I have about a million times) I would not have liked the movie. The Old Ones were not likable or memorable. Will Stanton was annoying. I feel bad saying mean things about child actors since they are still kids after all, but I guess it’s not his fault that I didn’t like his character at all since he didn’t write the terrible script. I did not have a problem with them trying to modernize the book a bit, but it was not well done. On the bright side, though, I was not hugely disappointed since I was expecting it to be bad.
*spoiler alert – (will spoil the movie, not the book)*
The “twist” ending of the movie was very stupid. Did Will Stanton need to have a secret twin? No. In the book Will finds out that he is a seventh son of a seventh son, which he did not know because his mother had a miscarriage before any of his siblings were born. In the movie however, Will had a twin who “mysteriously disappeared” and “surprise” he shows up again at the end. Boo. Hiss.
The other annoying thing is that Will sees a swirly pattern that lets him know that one of the signs is present. We are told that the swirly pattern is a “fractal”. Is it? Maybe it was, but it sure didn’t look like one in the movie. It just looked like swirls, I didn’t see any self-repeating patterns within each swirl. I know they must have worked hard on that symbol, but I didn’t think it worked. And the whole thing about Will knowing about fractals because his father is a physicist is dumb. I’m pretty sure I learned about fractals in my geometry class in junior high, maybe even earlier. I was also aggravated by Will’s father’s shoddy thesis on “the light and the dark”. It really didn’t sound like physics to me and when Will confronts him about it, their conversation sounds like drivel. I’m sure someone could’ve come up with something better if they really wanted to go the scientific route instead of the magical/spiritual kind of thing that comes across in the book.
Enough. Don’t waste your time on the movie. Go read the awesome, Newbery award winning book.