The Seeker: The Dark is Rising

Hi Aki,

Today I watched The Seeker: The Dark is Rising which is adapted from Susan Cooper’s YA novel The Dark is Rising. Cooper’s book is one of a series of 5 novels she published back in the 1960s and 70s. The adaptation is Fox Studio’s entry in the ‘Harry Potter Blockbuster Series Imitation’ sweepstakes but, like New Line’s The Golden Compass, is probably destined to be a one-shot money loser.

The story has the Stanton family in England from their native California. Will is the youngest of a big brood of 6 brothers and one sister. His brothers pick on him, and when he gets home from school for Christmas term break, he finds that his second-oldest brother has come back from college and has taken over his room. Well he’s not going to move in with the twins who are always picking on him, so he puts a futon up in the attic of the old house.

Strange things are happening in town, though, and Will is starting to see some strange things – usually swirling shapes in patterns. And there is a man all dressed in black who rides around town on a white horse, and stops Will on the road and demands that he hand over ‘the Signs.’ But Will doesn’t know what these are.

The answer is soon to come as the people of the Manor house take Will into an ancient church and tell him they are the Old Ones, who have been fighting on behalf of the Light against the Dark in an age-old struggle. Will they claim is an Old One himself, in fact the all-important Seeker – the one who can read The Book and know the Signs. Six Signs there are, hidden over the ages from the Rider who is the incarnation or representative of the Dark. The Rider’s powers are growing, for it is the time of the age once more when the Dark will rise and threaten to overwhelm the world, unless the Old Ones can assemble all Six Signs and use their power to counter the Rider. The Signs are made of different elements like glass, wood, iron; but the sixth Sign is in a human soul, and can never be found. On top of all this, Will can go through time to find the Signs where they were hidden. And there are only 5 days before the Rider’s powers will be at their peak, and if the Signs are not found before then, the world will be done for.

Well Will doesn’t believe this, but the Rider comes again, and the representatives and allies of the Rider, and there are thousands of black crows over the town, and the Old Ones walk Will from winter into spring, so what’s so hard to believe? One by one Will finds the signs; he sees the swirling fractal pattern glowing, and walks through time into the past, and retrieves the Signs.

But even members of Will’s family, and even the girl he’s got the hots for, can be tempted by the Rider into betraying Will. And though Will gets the five elemental Signs, how on earth will he find the Sign that cannot be found?

Of course there is a happy ending and young Will Stanton, the Seeker, uses his growing super powers to defeat the Rider and save the town and the world from snow and ice and dark. But it isn’t the end. The age is still one of conflicts, and there will be more battles ahead for … the Seeker!!!

The movie makes several crucial changes from the novel. It’s a while since I read Cooper’s books, so I only know a bit of the changes they made. The basic one, that sums up all the others, is that Cooper told of a family of Londoners who were on vacation in a small town in England, a quaint old place where they had some relatives. But Hollywood is sure that American kids can’t sympathize with British kids, Harry Potter notwithstanding, so Fox has to have a California Stanton pack.

And in the book Will didn’t have the super powers – or not so much anyway – and he was humble. But Americans today aren’t humble, if we ever were, and Hollywood wants to pander to our self-deceptions, and feed our egos. So Will is American, he is the Destined One, the Chosen One, and a Superboy all in one.

The books have their faults. It’s quite difficult to show a world of fantasy coexisting with our modern world; in fact I don’t think anybody succeeded in doing so before Joanne Rowling. In addition, The Dark is Rising is hard to film because it’s a puzzle tale: six signs have been hidden about the town, and all six must be found. That makes for six sequences of clues and discovery, on top of which there must be a couple of opening sequences to show Will in his status quo ante and learning who and what he is, and then coming to terms with it, and a climactic battle scene. It makes for a movie with about 10 sequences, all of them involving flashy special effects, and a huge budget with a long running time.

Fox chose instead to short-change the puzzle sequences, making them very short, which makes the puzzles seem easy, and not true puzzle at all: Will is just going along, suddenly sees the swirling fractal pattern, and boom! – he’s in the past and sees a Sign, grabs it with a bit of a struggle, and boom! – he’s back in the present.

But each of the sequences, almost all the scenes in fact, are packed with typical Hollywood digital effects. And the director tries to shoot everything to make it look ‘magical’ so it’s all pretty crazy to look at. This movie almost qualifies in the ‘looks great, stupid script’ line of films I started keeping track of when I first noticed that The Avengers looked cool and awesome with the sound turned off. (Tomb Raider is another in that line.) But The Seeker: the Dark is Rising doesn’t look good enough to quite qualify, and the cutting is so crazy (probably to bring it in with a short running time; there are something like 3 credited editors) that I couldn’t really enjoy the production design and effects anyway.

In the end the most damning thing I can say of this movie is how bland and generic Fox has made it. If they wanted just to imitate Harry Potter, why not come up with their own script property – surely 50-year-old minor British books aren’t famous enough to warrant this treatment, and the rights to the book must be less than the shoot’s craft services budget – paltry in comparison to the hundred, two hundred million dollars or so it cost Fox to develop, shoot, post and launch it (and it only grossed 8 million in North America, and 22 million abroad, for a really dreadful 31 million dollars total – somebody for sure got fired for this one).

Nobody in power understood that the charm in Cooper’s book lay in the specificity of the time and place, and the humble and unassuming nature of the tale, meant to be read over a school break to while away boredom of being shut in while the bad weather raged outside.

Just a waste, in fact.

(16 April 2009)