Wednesday, December 15, 2004
The Legend of Earthsea on the SciFi Channel, a review
It’s not Battlestar Galactica, but while we are waiting for the new Battlestar Galactica series coming in January, I thought I’d write about the Legend of Earthsea miniseries that I just watched on the SciFi Channel.
The miniseries is based on the series on the series of books by Ursula Le Guin, which I must admit that I’ve never read. But from the miniseries, I gather that the plot is the exact same plot that as in the Lord of the Rings and all of its imitators. It begins with a young man living in a small town in the middle of nowhere in the world of Earthsea. All fantasy worlds have to have a fantasy name that’s vaguely reminiscent of the real world, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. And the main character always comes from a small town. And usually, the main character has one, if not two, dead parents. King Arthur was an orphan, and so was Frodo Baggins. In Earthsea, Ged, the main character, has a dead mother, but his father is still alive.
As I’ve pointed out before, Star Wars also follows this same plot, with Luke Skywalker being an orphan from a planet in the middle of nowhere. But somehow, people accused Battlestar Galactica of being the “copycat” series.
Anyway, just like every other fantasy epic ever written, the main character goes out into the greater world to discover his true identity and save the world from evil through a series of highly unlikely events. Frodo Baggins has to save the world from evil by dropping the One Ring into the Crack of Doom. Ged has to save the world by reuniting the two parts of the Amulet of Peace, both parts of which have supposedly been lost from the world.
The most important difference between the Legend of Earth Sea and the Lord of the Rings is that Earthsea has more and better sex. Although Ged seems to remain a virgin throughout the entire story, the bad guy, King Tygath, looks like he’s having some good sex with Kossil, the evil priestess.
The final verdict on the miniseries? It's fun to watch, and the scenery and special effects are surprisingly good (at least they looked surprising good on a low resolution television). But the acting is horrible. Everyone is trying to affect some kind of medieval sounding accent which invariably comes off as corny and fake, like someone from California with no acting ability doing a bad job of pretending they have a medieval accent.