Jed Pittman

This weekend I went to see The Seeker: The Dark is Rising. I was excited to hear there was a film coming out because this was a book that I had really enjoyed reading when I was little. Now it’s become a screenplay/film, adapted from a children’s book written by Susan Cooper decades ago. Unfortunately, unlike other series in the children’s sci-fi/fantasy genre, this one comes up short for die hard fans like myself.

The original story had a fantastic plot. A young boy with amazing abilities comes into amazing power and responsibilities on his fourteenth birthday. His job is to unite a series of signs which will allow him to fight the Dark and save the world. This baseline along with the names of the characters is just about all that is salvaged from the book. Everything else is written in off the cuff.

The adaptations of stories to fit film is not uncommon. And this is an issue that has surfaced even with the recent Harry Potter films. Films rarely satisfy the most hardcore fans, even if they do run long and stick with the storyline. However, even the name of this story was changed. The original book was titled The Dark is Rising, not The Seeker: the Dark is Rising.

The change could quite possibly be the need to make the story about the boy rather than the struggle. This serves to internalize the struggle into the child rather than the world that he is fighting for. Perhaps this does a better job of selling it to the masses, but I am not convinced. Surely the boy is important, true.

The special effects do more to hurt the plot than help it at times. In the story, the power of the cold is downright frightening, without any special effects or CGI. And the major betrayals and complete character writeouts do much to water down the plot to nothing more than a chase scene for 2 hours.

In Cooper’s story there are rules and rhymes. An entire mythology was created for these characters and very little was left to the imagination for someone who read the entire 5 books in the series. Instead, the adaptation introduces strange information about a twin, a physicist father (which smacks of Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time series) and strange demonic possession.

The special effects really do make the movie worth seeing and it does flow fairly well if you like popcorn. But don’t expect it to follow the book in any way, it doesn’t. And if you feel that bad adaptations ruin books, then avoid this one like the plague and use the 2 hours to reread the book. You’ll enjoy it much more.

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