My Dragons
Yes, "Rising" Would Be the Word
I was so excited when I heard that there was going to be a film based on Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising. Second1 in a series (also called "The Dark is Rising"), the book tells the story of an 11-year-old English boy who discovers he's the key to saving, well, the world. It's one of the books I reread periodically, like The Lord of the Rings or the Miles Vorkosigan books or the Dies the Fire series.
Very excited. Then I saw the trailer, to which I am not providing a link; it can be Googled if you care. If you haven't read the book, the trailer's going to look like a bog-standard "kid gets mysterious mentor and discovers mystical destiny" kind of thing, which may or may not turn your crank. If you have read the book...well. It'd be great if someone made a film out of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising one of these days.
Perhaps it will tell you how bad this looks if I say that Rankin-Bass's version of The Return of the King appears to have been fairly faithful to the source material in contrast. They've made Will older to allow for dumb puberty jokes, they've made him American because in the wake of Harry Potter Americans are still considered to be too dumb to deal with a protagonist from another country2, and they've taken a mystical, thoughtful, morally complex plot and turned it into "Kid gets powerz, saves world", complete with plot tickets that I very much doubt will be played with the delicacy Cooper used.
Allow me to quote from another fan's reaction:
The most prominent point has been the claim of eliminating or "downplaying" (whatever that means) the pagan elements in the originals, by an admittedly-evangelical-Christian company dedicated to producing works of sound Christian entertainment - at least as they define "Christianity."
So what exactly have they downplayed, and what added, that would constitute taking out the heathenry and putting in the Gospels?
Well, judging by the trailer and the descriptions of the script and shooting by those who are making it, they have taken out - in addition to the King Arthur element , which I might remind you was according to Tolkien too Christian a mythos to work as proper epic fantasy - they have taken out all of the moral ambiguity and inner struggle in the originals, and replaced it with sex, greed, and violence.
Oh joy. I'll pass.
1: Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King; Silver on the Tree. I read DiR first, then went on to Greenwitch and was very puzzled by the characters from OS, US who appeared and whom I was supposed to know about already.
2: The Mystical Mentor is still British, because they have to be either British or black. It's a rule or something.