Return of the Fluff (Inheritance Review)

It would be unfair of me to mock Christopher Paolini's 849-paged finale for being about four times larger than it should have been, and it would be cruel of me to call Inheritance a worthless steaming pile of cow dung (figuratively-speaking).  Those kinds of things would be unprofessional exaggerations.

But I am no professional.

Inheritance is the fourth and final book in the Inheritance Cycle originally kicked off by the teenaged Christopher Paolini and his "Star Wars plot meets the Lord of the Rings universe" Eragon.  The series is about a young man named Eragon who discovers a dragon egg in the forest and suddenly finds himself becoming one of the last Dragon Riders, a once-noble group of elves and men who worked together with dragons to keep the peace in the land.  That is, until Galbatorix and thirteen of his favorite buddies all but wiped out the Riders and set Galbatorix up as ruler of the new Empire.  After over a century of iron-fisted dictatorship, Eragon appears on the scene and joins the Varden, who have rebelled against the Empire in the hopes of restoring Alagaesia to its former glory.

Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr (which I previously reviewed here) are conveniently summed up in Inheritance's first seven pages, which I found both very helpful and rather entertaining in an "I can't believe this is actually here" kind of way.  The plot is unnecessarily twisted and confused; I have to give Paolini credit for keeping everything straight because I cannot imagine any reader being able to do so, even with the 2000-word recap.  From there, you launch straight into battle, which is by far Paoloni's strongpoint.  The battles in this book, with the exception of Roran's scenes (more on him later), are excellently-written and meticulously crafted, if a bit gory.

Unfortunately, his attention to detail is also his great undoing.  I am not kidding when I say that you could cut out the first three-hundred pages of the book, slap them in as quick summary along with the other seven pages, and begin in earnest from there.  I cannot begin to count how many superfluous scenes litter this book: easily the majority of it.  I was being unfair earlier when I called Inheritance a worthless steaming pile of cow dung.  But in fantasy novels there is world-building, and there is fluff, and Inheritance is so fluffy that you'll suffocate before you find the animal underneath.  Paolini had originally intended for this quartet to be a trilogy, and I do believe that, with some simple editing, that could have been easily achieved.

Don't believe that the book is overly-long?  I challenge you to read the chapter in which Nasuada spends multiple pages obsessing over the fingernails of a character whose name you never even learn and see if you still feel the same.

The Plot (**WARNING! MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD**)

One of the two places where Inheritance really falls flat is here, in the plot line.  You get the sense that Paolini is simply going through the motions by book four.  He is completely incapable of letting more than a few minutes pass by without telling you about them, so while he continues switching POVs between Eragon, Nasuada, and Roran as he has for the past few books, nothing of particular interest happens for a very long time.  For those first three-hundred pages or so there are no twists or interesting turns of events.  The course stays steadily forward at a leisurely pace. Capture this town in the name of the Varden.  Assess damage.  Move on to next town.  Capture in the name of the Varden.  Keep heading north towards Uru'baen.  Fight, win, take stock, continue onward.  This is the kind of pacing suited for a video game, not a book.  Perhaps he wanted you to be as tired of this war as the characters are by the time they reach Galbatorix.  Whether that was his intention or no, I guarantee that you will feel this way.  If I had to choose one word to describe this book, it would be "slog".  The book should have started with the Varden's army outside of Dras-Leona, but instead you get to spend hundreds of pages reading about how three other cities fall to the rebels and how Galbatorix makes no attempt to slow their progression.

Some of the sub-plots work well enough - like watching Elva come to terms with her "gift" of feeling others' pain - but many are not explored sufficiently, and there are countless minor characters and "who the  hell was that?" moments that the author simply left open.  In a way, this keeps the plot more organic - do you know what has become of every person you've ever met? - but at the same time they just continue to add to the page count that needs no expansion as it is.

The biggest problem with the plot is a lack of opposition.  Sure, you only see the POVs of the heroes (though one from Galbatorix would have been awesome), but that shouldn't mean the bad guys aren't hatching any plots of their own.  Galbatorix and the Empire do not react.  They are like poor A.I. in a video game.  They simply wait for the Varden to show up.  How would The Lord of the Rings have progressed without the Nazgul seeking out Frodo?  How would Star Wars have changed if Darth Vader only used Star Destroyers to defend Empire-controlled planets?  Part of the appeal of the Harry Potter series was that Voldemort was always up to something and it was up to Harry to stop him.  There was a sense of urgency; if Harry didn't win by the end of the school year, the wizarding world was doomed.  In Inheritance the only urgency comes from the Varden's limited supplies.  If they don't do something now, then the army will disband - not die, mind you, but disband and go home to find some dinner.  That's not urgency, no matter how much the narrator tries to talk about how urgent things are.  It's no coincidence that the point at which I felt the plot actually began was the point in which one of the bad guys - Murtagh, one of the only interesting characters - appeared and hatched a freaking plot.  That was more than 300 pages in, more than one page for every oiled Spartan who followed King Leonidas to certain doom.  Paolini could learn from the Spartans and their efficiency.

In an odd paradox, though, I would almost argue that Inheritance is both too long and too short.  I know how retarded this sounds, but hear me out before you get the room with the nice padded walls ready.  That stupid fluff metaphor I used earlier?  The fluff made the book seem too long, but once you got down to the real plot - that is, once Paolini got away from spending pages describing fingernails and balls of mud (I kid you not) and suddenly remembered that a story was going on - it felt curiously rushed, like the author couldn't wait to move on to the next scene filled with completely useless knowledge.

Ultimately, though, there is little in this book that is really necessary for the reader to know going in to the final battle, and that's not the mark of a good writer, no matter how technically skilled Paolini's keyboardsmanship may have become since his almost laughable Eragon.

The Setting

By this point in the series, you should be pretty familiar with Alagaesia.  Eragon is from Carvahall.  The Haradric - excuse me, Hadarac - Desert is huge.  Galbatorix lives in Uru'baen.  To Paolini's credit, I found myself rarely looking at the map in the front of the book to try to figure out where in the hell the characters were.  You could watch the Varden's march from Surda to Uru'baen, and that was pretty cool.  By the end of Inheritance you will have seen nearly every place marked on that map, with the exception of the southwestern islands, one of which (Illium), appears to be named after a section of the human small intestine.  If only the islands around it were something like "Je'junum" and "Seecum".  But I digress.

A small beef I have with Alagaesia is that I do not believe that a land of that size has so few settlements.  Only about a dozen human towns on the entire continent?  I don't think so.  Paolini gives no indication that there are farmsteads, or villages, or anything one would expect besides the handful of places listed on the map.  You get almost no sense about how anyone other than the Varden feel about the state of affairs, either, except for the multiple people who actually boo and hiss the Varden once they "liberate" a city.  The citizens of the Empire do not welcome the rebel army.  You start to wonder if anyone under Galbatorix's rule actually wants their king gone, but unfortunately Paolini never tells you.  You have to take the narrator's word for it that the Varden are right and Galbatorix is wrong, so just for fun I started to read the book as if the opposite were the case.  You know what?  It still held, and in many instances it actually worked better.  Uh oh.

The Characters (**MORE MINOR SPOILERS HERE**)

This is the other area in which Inheritance fails severely.  I did something I don't usually do while writing these blog entries: I read some other reviews to see what other, less-harsh people had to say, and I found someone on Amazon who summed up Paolini's problem perfectly: "he does not build a world with a story and have characters drive the story forward; he drives the story forward and has characters along for the ride".  This is most particularly apparent in the ending (which I will discuss at the end of this entry), but the problem can easily be seen throughout all of the four books.

Eragon has grown since the first book, and one could argue that this series is first and foremost a coming-of-age tale.  Yet, by the end of everything, I still felt like Eragon was little more than a hollow shell into which the reader was supposed to insert him/herself, much like Bella in the Twilight series.  Eragon often displays emotions like anger, jealousy, and downright brattiness, but they're all so shallow and spur-of-the-moment that all they do is make him seem even more like a baby than he was way back in Eragon.  He is far too quick to despair when he cannot think of a solution, and his continued duels with Arya show just how childish he still is.  There finally comes a turning point in his maturity, but it is so late in coming that I had stopped caring long ago.

Saphira is one of the few interesting characters.  She is like a gigantic cat; her vanity offers one or two small moments of humor, and oftentimes she brings a certain directness to the table that the extremely loquacious humans, elves, and dwarves singularly lack (the two-leggers will discuss every possible angle of an argument any time two or more of them get together, which is both unrealistic and boring).  Unfortunately Saphira has hardly grown since the first book, and her one POV chapter felt more like an accidental photobomb that, like all of the other non-Eragon chapters, did little to progress the story.

Arya, the ever-unobtainable love interest, doesn't change.  This mostly makes sense, as she is an elf and has had quite a lot of time to develop her personality, but you find little in her to really enjoy as a character.  She's just there, constantly rejecting Eragon's advances (a scenario to which I can relate and in which I took a devious delight).  As Eragon begins to match her in magical abilities, you do start to see a friendship grow, but Arya has been nagged by this puppy for so long that I had a hard time believing she would ever come to regard him as an equal.

Roran is a horrible character.  He's the story's Rambo with no personality and a wife who also has no personality.  Roran's chapters are so thoroughly pointless as to almost be comical, and one scene of his in particular gets my award for "most stupidest scene evarr" for Inheritance.  It's the chapter entitled "A Toss of the Bones", involving a surprise attack on the Varden's camp during the siege of Aroughs.  If you've read the book, you know of what I speak.  I cannot think of anything Roran adds to the story other than a point of view of a soldier weak against magic.  This is indeed a theme in Inheritance, but it's nothing that a simple conversation with Roran during an Eragon chapter couldn't have fixed.  I was so tired of reading about Roran fighting for Katrina and his unborn child that I almost wanted the character to die just so that he'd shut up.  When you've come to the point of actually cheering against the protagonists, you know the book is in trouble.  Roran has a certain bloodlust that bordered on disturbing, and let's not forget the fact that at the start of this story this man was a farmer with absolutely no combat experience.  How he was able to constantly beat hundreds of trained soldiers is totally beyond me.

Katrina only seems to be there to give Roran something to fight for.  She and Arya are strange foils for each other in the romance department: where Arya is the independent woman who wants nothing to do with Eragon's advances, Katrina's only two functions appear to be housework and baby-making.  Both Katrina and Arya are extremes, and both are unlikable.

Angela is another prime example of pointlessness.  I'll discuss her in a special rant at the end of this review.  It won't be pretty.  I hate this character with a passion burning brighter than the light of a thousand stars.

King Orrin of Surda takes a bizarre turn in this book.  Specifically, this once-cheery and artistic king apparently decides to shirk his responsibilities and become an angry alcoholic.  He blames stress, but his condition never improves even when circumstances do, so I blame Paolini's issue with having the plot drive the character.  He needed King Orrin to become an antagonist to Nasuada, and so he wrote a glass of wine into the King's hand and a foul temper into his head so that things could continue on as the author required.

Nasuada's POVs throughout Inheritance are actually interesting and tend to show a different perspective on the goings on of Alagaesia.  Her chapters in the latter half of the book in particular offered some fresh scenes of not-action and not-endless-fluff (with the exception of the aforementioned obsession with a man's fingernails), but the whole thing falls apart when in the end you realize that her chapters, like Roran's, offered nothing but a distraction to the plot.  With everything she goes through, to see her as nothing more than a damsel in distress in the climax was extremely disappointing.  There were countless opportunities for Paolini to have done something interesting with her there, but alas.

Murtagh, like Nasuada, was one of the very few characters I cared for in Inheritance.  He is the series' Darth Vader, the character who is most torn between good and evil, but Paolini does not explore this near as much as he should have.  Though it would have broken from his previous books, it would have benefited the plot greatly if Paolini had done a chapter from Murtagh's point of view.  Just like Nasuada, though, Murtagh is thoroughly underutilized by the story's end, and that was a major letdown.

Galbatorix, as you might guess, finally makes his grand appearance, and I have to admit that it was mostly worth it.  I remember nothing of his physical description, but it's his voice that is his most distinctive feature, and Paolini did indeed do well here.  Galbatorix is, for the most part, a smooth talker, and you can almost feel the power in his words.  It was rather silly, though, how long it takes to actually see Galbatorix after you first encounter him; he remains in the shadows for so long that you just know Paolini was grinning as he wrote the scenes and muttering to himself, "Yeah this'll keep the suspense going!"  It was a cheesy effect that somewhat dampened the impact of the character's reveal.  And when the heroes don't do as he commands, his transition from smooth-talking politician to angry whiny baby was so sudden that it almost made Eragon look grown up by comparison.

Everyone else I had trouble remembering from past books.  Orik the dwarven king was alright in a jolly sort of way.  Elva the creepy girl Eragon blessed towards the end of the first book remained creepy and more or less unhelpful, but of course she offered to help out when Eragon needed it the most (even though her "help" amounted to absolutely nothing).  But the characters who had no business in continually popping up were the villagers from Carvahall.  Half the time I couldn't remember who these characters were supposed to be, and the other half of the time I simply accepted that their names looked vaguely familiar and moved on.  There was no reason to spend two solid chapters on the birth of a baby by one of the Carvahall women, especially since you practically never saw the baby's family members again for the rest of the book.

The Editing

As I said before, Inheritance is four or five times longer than it needs to be, meaning that about 80% of the book is pure, useless fluff.  Paolini's writing isn't exactly bad; in fact, it's grown immensely since Eragon.  But his editing and - more importantly, - the job done by his editor are offensively poor.  There was no reason for Brisingr and Inheritance to be two separate books.  That was a failing of epic proportions on his editor's part.  She should be fired.  I mean, come on, look at the tree that Paolini plops onto her desk:

That's downright insulting.  I'm pretty sure she just checked for spelling errors (ignoring the incorrect pluralization of Eldunari) and sent it off to be published.

Conclusion

If you've bothered to read the first three books already, then you might as well finish, but do yourself a favor and start with the siege of Dras-Leona.  Everything before that (and most things after) is completely unnecessary.  Many people have stated that they were disappointed by the number of loose ends left by the book's end, and while I agree that many subplots fell by the wayside and there were probably more characters that I didn't know than those that I did, there were at least as many reviewers who join me in saying that the book should have ended about sixty pages before it actually did, and that's not including the pronunciation guide, the glossary, or the acknowledgments (where Paolini gleefully hints that this is not the last book he'll write concerning Alagaesia, oh joy!).  But if you want to see whether or not Eragon finally defeats Galbatorix, then give this a shot.

But get your best swamp gear ready, because it is a slog.

The Ending (**OBVIOUSLY, MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD**)

Many reviews I read were disappointed with the book's "imperfect" ending.  Ignoring the fact that the post-climax felt more like a history book than a novel and that its listing of events went on for far too long, I was thrilled by the fact that Eragon and Arya don't end up together.  The reader is never given any good reason as to why they should.  Their friendship was pretty well-established, sure, but romance?  No.  Hell no.  It shouldn't happen, and it didn't, and that was alright by me.  Paolini did himself a service by avoiding cliche, and for that I will applaud him with the lightest and slowest of golf claps.

Where I do not applaud him, however, is in his deus ex machina solution to taking down big bad Galbatorix.  Deus ex machina, in case you don't know, is a term generally used to refer to moments in stories where a solution just comes completely out of nowhere to fix the problem.  Toy Story 3's ending had this, and so did the ending for Inheritance.  Paolini messed up big time by making a villain who was simply too powerful, and the lengths he had to go to in order for the heroes to win felt more like a cheat code to beat the final boss of a video game than pure, honest ingenuity.

The sudden production of the Dauthdaert, a spear capable of penetrating all magic, was as mystifying as it was completely against the rules Paolini had already set up for his world.  Add that to Galbatorix's use of the Word of Words, and you have a climactic scene that was less about the clashing of characters as it was a cheap manipulation of Paolini's magic rules.  The scene's entire set up was a rude imitation of the climax of Return of the Jedi, with Galbatorix watching as Eragon and Murtagh duel with their colored swords.  But where in RotJ you see Luke Skywalker realize what he could become and defy it, here you just have pointless swordplay and Eragon defeating Galbatorix through the power of understanding.  But, unlike a similar finale for a certain Orson Scott Card classic, this felt like an unbelievable letdown.  After almost three-thousand pages, Eragon pulls some unspoken magic almost literally out of his arse to force the mad king to feel the misery he has brought on his people until he blows himself up?  Come on.  There were too many violations of the magical world which Paolini had established for this victory to feel properly won.  1) The Dauthdaert used to take down Galbatorix's admittedly awesome dragon was too out-of-nowhere, 2) the Name of Names suffered from the same problem, and its effects were never clearly explained (did it completely dispel all magic, or did it just alter magic to the speaker's liking?), 3) To my knowledge Eragon had never even performed an unspoken spell before, and they supposedly take such a degree of concentration that Eragon, near death and in the most stressful situation of his life, could hardly be believed to have pulled off a spell so great that he forced the most powerful magician in the universe to live every moment of a thousand lives.  The most fitting end would more likely have been something to do with Eragon's and Galbatorix's true names, but those things, which had seemed so important to know before the fight, were never brought up.

The whole scene, from the random children as hostages to Nasuada's uselessness to the pointless fight against Murtagh, paled in comparison to the same scene from Star Wars, which was written by George Lucas, the same man responsible for Jar Jar Binks and Kinect Star Wars.  I can hardly think of a greater insult, but Paolini earned it.

Speaking of Nasuada, I cannot over-stress my disappointment in her story arc.  It held such promise.  She and Murtagh had a thing going on during her imprisonment that was - finally! - the first decent bit of romantic tension we've seen in the entire series.  He promises to help her escape, and I was expecting some great moment when he'd do just that and get her out of there just as the Varden begin their final attack, but what happens?  The Varden attack "a day before Murtagh can get his plans in order", and it all amounts to nothing.  And since you see no one's POV but Eragon's after the victory over Galbatorix, you are left wondering how Nasuada feels about all of this, and that was, for me, the greatest letdown of them all.

One more quick note on a controversial point about the ending: Eragon's self-imposed banishment from Alagaesia.  This is a prime example of Paolini moving the plot forward and bringing the characters along for the ride rather than building a character-driven story.  Eragon appears to come to this decision because of the prophesy Angela made in Eragon (Your fate will be to leave this land forever.  Where you will end up I know not but you will never again stand in Alagaesia.  This is inescapable.  It will come to pass even if you try to avoid it).  So, to appease his own fate (read: Paolini's wishes), Eragon decides to pack up his things and all the dragon eggs and sail to the Undying Lands - I mean, whatever lies east a\of Alagaesia.  While I actually understand Eragon's thought process that goes into choosing to train the new Dragon Riders outside of Alagaesia, there is absolutely no reason as to why Eragon "will never return".  Perhaps secretly he does not like Roran, or Orik, or Arya, so he uses this as an excuse to get away from them.  That's how I read it, but perhaps that was just because I didn't much like those characters, either.

Either way, I understand Eragon's decision, but the only reason I know of as to why he will never return to Alagaesia, despite having a flying dragon, is because fate said so.

The Rant of Angela

I like wise, goofy characters.  Yoda and his bizarre speech, Master Splinter and his insistence upon ending each of the old TMNT movies by "making a funny", even Pai Mei and his "contempt for women" in the Kill Bill films; these are great characters.  Despite (or perhaps because of) their humor, you learn just how bad-ass they are over the course of the story.  Their humor shows a certain childishness about each of them that endears them to you.  They show their skills to prove to you and the heroes that they are to be respected, and then they guide the heroes on their journey with wisdom so pure and simple you would be a fool to ignore it.

Angela is a spoof of these characters.

I see no greater failing in Paolini's writing than in Angela.  As Lost fans may tell you, a good mystery does not mean that you answer no questions but raise a hundred more.  But that is precisely what Angela does.  Throughout the Inheritance Cycle you are barraged with references to Angela's past and how awesome she is, yet you learn nothing about her.  There are passing references about her former master and that she visited the elves at some point, but that's about all you get.  She's quirky in a way that teaches Eragon nothing (like how she knits a sweater to ward off rabbits, or how she tells him to beware of earwigs and wild hamsters).  Perhaps strangest of all, she knows of atoms and other scientific things that feel wholly out of place in this fantasy world; though, as ever, you are not even given a hint as to how she has come across such knowledge.  And after saying, "What am I?  Chopped liver?", she had the following to say:

"What a strange expression," said the herbalist.  "Who would compare themselves to chopped liver in the first place?  If you have to choose an organ, why not pick a gallbladder or a thymus gland instead?  Much more interesting than a liver.  Or what about chopped t--"  She smiled.  "Well, I suppose that's not important."
-Inheritance, page 265 (hardback American edition)

As a nursing student, and thus someone who actually knows a little something about the organs mentioned above, I take offense to this sad attempt at wittiness.  A gallbladder is not interesting, I assure you.  It is a storage sac.  And, again, Angela's scientific knowledge receives absolutely no clarification.  I would have accepted just about any explanation, even something like "she's a time-traveler from another dimension", but you are given nothing but idiotic jokes about a small sack of bile.

A character cannot be wise and revered simply because the narrator says she is so.  Angela does show her combat prowess both with magic and her profoundly stupid lightsaber, Twinkledeath (which is of course the most powerful sword in existence, though apparently not as powerful as the Dauthdaert, but that's okay because the Dauthdaert is a spear).  But combat skills do not make one wise.  In the cases of Yoda, Master Splinter, and Pai Mei, each one is an undeniably great fighter, yet the reason why each is revered is because they teach their heroes something about themselves that becomes key to defeating the villain.  They help their students succeed.  They show the viewers some way to look at life that they might not have considered yet.  Angela's only usefulness is to give a prophecy that imposes the author's will upon Eragon and then refuse to die for the rest of the series, despite my most sincere wishes.

It is my understanding that Angela is based on Paolini's sister - also named Angela.  I am not sure how strong that base is, but Angela sticks out so badly in the world of Alagaesia that I have no choice but to believe that she is a fair representation of Paolini's sister.  It almost makes me feel bad, to so strongly detest a character who is in fact based on a real person.  Perhaps that is why I would believe it if Angela were to say that she has time-traveled from another dimension: she basically has.  Paolini has transplanted his modern-day sister into a medieval-style fantasy.  But in the end, all the character has done is cheapen the world Paolini has spent nearly three-thousand pages to painstakingly create.

I hate Angela the herbalist as I have never hated a character before.  I am not exaggerating when I say that I would rather read an entire novel about Jar Jar Binks' indigestion than read another scene involving this witch.  She is an affront to the very concept of "wise" - a concept that must be entirely foreign to our dear Mr. Paolini.

Wrath of the Nerds (Wrath of the Titans Review)

Let me get this out of the way first: Wrath of the Titans is fun, gorgeous eye-candy.

Okay, now that that's over with, let's get down to actual critique.

This is Warner Brothers' sequel of 2010's annoyingly successful Clash of the Titans, which I previously reviewed here.  That film in turn was a remake of the 1981 Dynarama extravaganza of the same name, so in an odd sense, this is like a sequel thirty years in the making.  In Clash of the Titans, a demigod named Perseus - the son of Zeus and a mortal woman - must travel to the ends of the Earth to claim the head of Medusa and battle the dreaded Kraken.  I have already voiced my complaints in my review, so I will not reiterate them here.  I bring up Clash of the Titans merely to say that, mercifully, Wrath of the Titans is multiple times better than its predecessor.

Thanks to my upbringing a well as my own personal tastes, I know an uncomfortably large amount of useless knowledge concerning Greek myth, so one may understand why the first film and its distinctly Norse mega-monster would irk me so.  This film, thankfully, stuck purely to its Greek roots, with some considerable modern influences that I will touch upon soon.

Wrath picks up several years after the events of Clash.  Perseus (Sam Worthington) has grown out his hair, fathered a son, and buried a wife - Io from the first film, who fell ill to a scheduling conflict and never recovered.  Despite his fame, Perseus is determined to lead a quiet life with his son as a fisherman, but that wouldn't make for a great movie, so it isn't long before Zeus pays him a visit and a chimera attacks the tiny fishing village for plot-convenient reasons.  One thing leads to another, and before you know it our always-reluctant hero is off to save the day once again.

Right off the bat you can tell that none of the writers from Clash have returned.  This is no longer a tale of sandy Magi, sea monsters from Norway, and scorpions the size of Mack trucks.  This is a tale of fatherhood, a topic all too familiar with those well-versed in Greek myth.  To be honest, this is a tale so much about fatherhood that at times it seems to beat you over the head with Poseidon's trident to get the point across.  Zeus' favor of Perseus leads Ares, the god of war (and son of Zeus himself) to join Hades in betraying the other gods.  Zeus is captured and placed in Tartarus, where his life force is slowly drained to restore Kronos (the head Titan, and father to Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades) so that he will reclaim the world from the ailing gods.  Since the humans no longer pray to the gods, the gods' powers are failing, so Ares and Hades think that Kronos will grant them immortality if they help free him.  A nice touch that also probably saved on special effects is that, unlike in Clash of the Titans, you do not see the gods on Olympus, nor do you see them in their awesome godly armor.  The Olympians each don more conservative garb as an effective visual cue that humanity's lack of piety has drained them of much of their former luster.

What I don't understand is why the gods depend on human belief to survive (even though they were around before humans existed), but Titans don't.  Slight plot hole, and by that I mean that it's so large that Tartarus itself probably fathered it.  As I said before, the concept of fatherhood is all over this movie.

What really bothers me is something Wrath of the Titans seems to have taken from the recent film Immortals (2011), which is the idea that gods can be killed.  This seems silly to me.  Ancient myth tells that Hera was so displeased with Hephaestus when he was born that she threw him off of Mt. Olympus, and all it did was make him ugly and give him a limp.  He didn't die from being a baby flung off a mountain, so why should the gods be as vulnerable as they are in this film?  The writers must have felt that having the gods be subject to death would provide a sense of urgency to the plot, but I don't think they fully understand an idea often touched upon in other films: that there are fates worse than death.  I think it'd be more compelling if Kronos' revival from Tartarus would have meant dismemberment for Zeus (a common idea for old god myths).  Perhaps his body parts would be flung to the farthest reaches of Earth, and he'd spend eternity with his body torn to shreds.  That to me seems far worse a fate than "abyss", as Hades at one point explains it.  Having gods be able to die just turns them into humans and, for me at least, makes them much less interesting to watch.

While the film largely nailed their return to Greek form (including some very strong story influence from the recent Heroes of Olympus series of books by Rick Riordan), it still struggles with a Greek sense of Zeus and Hades.  This would be the modern influence I mentioned earlier.  Myth explains that after the victory over the Titans, the three most powerful gods each chose a realm over which to rule: Zeus the sky, Poseidon the earth and sea, and Hades the underworld.  Hades was not "banished to hell", as the film would have you believe (and no one would ever tell Perseus to "go to hell", as happens here to set up a lame joke that that is, in fact, where he is going).  The Christian influence over these films is hard to miss, with Zeus playing the role of God the Father and Hades serving as Satan.  Wrath even includes a theme of forgiveness that may be better-suited for a more overtly-Christian film.  This, combined with the aforementioned plot point that gods can die, is in the end a telling difference between the ancient Greek and the modern American psyches.  The Greeks were not afraid of death in the way Americans are today.  There was no "heaven" or "hell" - everyone went to the Underworld and were then judged and divided based on the worthiness of their souls.  Do great things, end up in Elysium or the Isles of the Blessed.  Do bad things, rot in the Fields of Punishment, but to the Underworld you would go no matter what. Hades became your lord in the afterlife whether you were a hero or a serial murderer.  But put an American spin on the tale, and suddenly gods become vulnerable, the lord of the Underworld and the god of war become the villains, and death is something to fear.  It seems little more than a cop-out to try to keep things familiar with the audience, because heaven forbid we should ever have to watch something that may only be familiar to dorks who read about this kind of thing for fun.

Anyway, back to the movie itself.  Sam Worthington (Perseus) does his hero thing to mild effect.  Liam Neeson (Zeus) could read from the phone book and I'd be entertained.  Ralph Fiennes (Hades) adjusted his Hades from the previous film and made the character less creepy, more generic.  He ditched his whispering death-voice and mostly just spoke normally.  I'm not sure why, but it was disappointing.  Edgar Ramirez was sulky and menacing as Ares.  Toby Kebbell (Agenor, a demigod son of Poseidon) and Bill Nighy (Hephaestus) were definitely the stand-out performances that offered some great comedic relief and a bit of personality to the film's otherwise dry dialogue.  Finally, Rosamund Pike stepped in for Alexa Davalos (who was "unavailable") as Andromeda, but that was just fine with me.  Ms. Pike has been one of my favorites since that horrible Bond film with the guy with diamonds in his face, and she did fairly well with what she was given (which is to say not much).  It's just as well that she looks completely different from Ms. Davalos, as the Andromeda from Clash and the one from Wrath are entirely different characters.  Where before Andromeda was little more than your standard useless damsel in distress, here she is almost perpetually in armor and speaks as casually with Perseus as if she were just one of the boys.  There was one thing concerning her character that I hated, however, but I'll cover that in the spoiler section at the bottom.

While I'm on the subject of casting, something did strike me as very odd.  Aside from the army sequences, in which I believe most of the humans were CG anyway, there seemed to be very few humans on the set at any given time.  Perseus' traveling band of adventurers, despite being accompanied by a Queen, were very few.  And even though the Underworld and Tartarus appear to be one and the same in this film, the place is almost completely desolate despite its enormous size.  Surely it was not designed, with its human-sized maze network, just to hold a Titan the size of a mountain (to be fair, the entire Tartarus sequence was extremely poorly done).  Clash of the Titans at least gave you a sense that Perseus was fighting for a civilization.  In Wrath, you could be led to believe that the only ones who would suffer if he failed in his quest would be the Greek army who foolishly set up camp at the bottom of a valley.  A somewhat minor complaint, but the writers made the mistake of making the story more personal while upping the level of action from Kraken to Kronos without seeming to think that a mountain of lava traipsing around Greece would probably have a greater impact on its population's well-being than a sea monster who was only really interested in eating a single princess in the first place.

I did not see the film in 3D, having made that mistake once already with the prequel, so I cannot comment on how good or bad those effects were.  However, since I understand that the effects were inserted in post-production, I can just about guarantee that they are not worth your money.  The movie was gorgeous in 2D, though.  The effects were top-notch, the people were (mostly) attractive, and the locales were interesting and varied.  The camerawork was pretty good up until the finale, where the action onscreen overwhelmed the camera, and much seemed lost in the translation (though not NEAR as much as was lost in the filming of The Hunger Games.  I'm still sore about how poor the "shaky cam" work was in that movie).  The plot lagged heavily in the middle and leading into the climax, but otherwise the pacing was fine.  The ending was almost touching, save for one point which I will cover below.

All in all, Wrath of the Titans is as I said in the opening line: a fun, beautiful romp through ancient Greece.  Go check it out if you feel like watching Sam Worthington beat up on all sorts of monsters and don't mind an experience that, despite its improved writing, feels about as deep as the saucer of whiskey I leave out for the cats each night.

But don't name your son after the Greek sun god, Helios.  That's just silly.  And strangely ironic.  Son god.  I see what you did there.

****SPOILER SECTION DO NOT READ IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE ENDING OR YOU WILL DIE****
Okay, so as I mentioned before, there was one thing about Andromeda that really bothered me.  Towards the end of the film, I remember thinking that I was glad the movie hadn't tried to force any kind of romance between her and Perseus.  They certainly got along and all that, but there was never any indication that the two had any feelings for each other.  And then, out of nowhere, Perseus walks into Andromeda's tent and gives her a big fat kiss.  Then he leaves, and Andromeda is left looking about as stunned as I must have been.  I have never, in my whole life, seen a romance as poorly-done as that, with the obvious exception of Star Wars Episode II.  It's not even fair to call it a romance.  There was zero buildup.  Zero resolution.  The kiss just happened, and that was it.  I don't care that he's Perseus, the savior of Greece twice-over; you don't simply walk into a monarch's tent and start making out with her.  It was stupid and forced and actually managed to top the chemistry-devoid romance from Clash of the Titans, which I didn't think was possible.

Too Human, or Too Poorly Written?

I talk about plot quite often on this blog. In Hollywood, a film can still do well without a good plot if it is well-directed or acted, has great action scenes, or generally contains lots of eye-candy (see: Avatar). For novels, plot is considerably more important, though, again, not strictly a necessity. Instead of being able to fall back on a great actor, director, or visual effects artist, a novelist without a plot can create an interesting setting, or write so well that plot becomes secondary to his or her style.

So what about videogames?

Better yet, why should we even care about the plot of a videogame?

It's an understatement to say that games have come a long way in the past quarter-century.  Thirty years ago today, the world met Pac-Man.  Twenty-five years ago, North America saw the first Famicom, or Nintendo Entertainment System, along with everyone but John McCain's favorite plumber, Mario.  At that time, the pinnacle of electronic home entertainment was an 8-bit man in overalls hopping across platforms as he bounces on the heads of mushroom men and evil turtles.  Any background or story pretty much spawned from what you made of the game's pixelated world.

Today's game systems feature increasingly robust online capabilities, so that now anyone can experience the joy of playing Halo 3 (rated M, meaning that you're supposed to be over 18 before you play it) with a horde of prepubescent 11-year-olds who are more concerned with taking their new dirty words for a spin than they are actually playing.  The online mode has fundamentally altered the layout of today's gaming community.  Now, with every game made, the producers have an important choice to make: do we make a single-player game, or one with lots of multiplayer capabilities?  On older systems, when they went with the latter, the result was rarely anything special, and the single-player experience suffered accordingly.  If a game tried to be multiplayer-centric, it pretty much had to abandon a single-player mode entirely to be successful (see: Mario Party).  It seems like the games I remember playing the most were the rare gems that found that balance between being something that I could play when my friends weren't there and something that I could play when they were, like Star Fox 64, 007: Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and even Super Smash Brothers.

Somewhat ironically, now that the Xbox 360 is around, and its online modes are so good (it comes with a headset that you can talk into!) multiplayer games have undergone a sort of reversal, where now it's actually quite difficult to play one while in the same room as your friends.  Splitscreen is so 2003, gosh.  Seems like the only games that still do that are Rock Band/Guitar Hero and just about anything on the Nintendo Wii, which shuns online modes in general.  This worked out great for myself and my friends, who had the joy of growing up with local multiplayer and then gaining online multiplayer once we split apart for college.

It's hard to generalize about plots in games, since the genres are so varied.  Of course RPGs (Role-Playing Games) are going to have better plots than a racing game or a sports game.  In fact, when it comes to a sports game, I don't want a plot (ahem Blitz: The League)!  Therefore, for the sake of argument, I will be referring to the genres that are technically supposed to have stories to them: RPGs, Action-Adventures, FPSs (First-Person Shooters).  As a side-note, though, I recently played a demo of a new racer called Split/Second, and while it didn't exactly have a plot, its premise was simple and brilliant.  You're a contestant on a reality show, and during the race you have the opportunity to press a button that will blow things up as your competitors drive past them, thereby potentially destroying their cars and launching you ahead of them in the standings.  It was uncomplicated, effective, and intuitive, and I highly recommend it.

So, what would you do if you were told to write a storyline for a videogame?

Would you write a linear plot - like a book/movie - that happened to feature lots of opportunities for battles (some kind of war game, perhaps)?  Would you write a detective story with branching plotlines depending on what the gamer uncovers (like the excellent Heavy Rain on the PS3)?  Or would you write the flimsiest piece of crap that you could to allow for maximum gaming in the hopes that the game developers have more talent than you do?  Do you present your story through in-game cutscenes, rendered cutscenes, text, or dialog that goes on while the gamer plays?  Do you hire voice-actors, and if so, should you try to get a big name (like Haley Joel Osment for the Kingdom Hearts games or John Cleese for Fable III) or find the cheapest actors you can (Dynasty Warriors!  Just Cause 2!)?  If the setting is fictional, how much backstory do you provide?

The list seems endless, and just about every option has been tried, to varying effect.  I've seen games with no voice acting but the most wonderful storylines (Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy VI, Skies of Arcadia) and games with voice-acting better than many animated movies (Kingdom Hearts, Bioware games like Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic).  I've seen games where the world's history is presented to you only in the instruction booklet (this happens more often than you might think), and games where a character walks and talks to you while you still control your own guy (making for some hilarious moments of personal space invasion that, sadly, doesn't even faze the speaker), and games with slick, stylized cutscenes that look more like comic book frames than anything else (Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2).  A great story can come in just about any form, when it comes to games.  It just depends on what the developers have at their disposal.

Believe it or not, I'm writing this post specifically because of one game, one that is somewhat related to the next post that I shall be writing.  It's called Too Human (for the Xbox 360, 2008), a hack-n-slash, loot-drop game whose setting is a sort of science-fiction retelling of Norse mythology.

Two quick, unimportant definitions first:

Hack-n-slash: the type of game where you control one guy (Baldur, in this case) who slices his way through hundreds of enemies as he progresses from room to room.  You have a health bar that depletes every time you get hit.  These games are primarily about the action.

Loot-drop: when the enemies die, they routinely drop new weapons and armor for you to try on or sell.

Yay!  Anyway, I knew very little about Norse mythology going into this game.  I knew that Thor was the god of thunder (and a great character to play as in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance because everytime you kill something he says "The son of Odin is triumphant!" or some other nonsense), and Loki was the trickster god responsible for Jim Carrey's The Mask, and Odin was important somewhere in there, but that was about it.

The story of this game is presented as if you have been dropped right into the middle of the game.  You are given no backstory except through things that character mention off-hand, and with everyone who speaks to you you must figure out who the hell they are on your own.  You learn that Baldur's wife or something died at some point, and after a mission or two you learn that some guy named Hod was responsible.  For the entire time, the game plays as if you are somehow supposed to know the full backstory already, and believe me, it's frustrating.  I realize that game developers probably aren't all that concerned with getting the gamer emotionally invested in their game, but it couldn't hurt to try.  Some games do well with less story (like the "sandbox" style Just Cause 2, where I spend more time hijacking helicopters, flying them as high as they'll go, then blowing them up and freefalling for a good five minutes before pulling my chute as close to the ground as I can without giving the landscape a fresh pockmark), but your missions in Too Human are not just to go out and kill mindless monsters; they are directly involved with the game's overall plot, like the mission where your character decides to hunt Hod down and kill him for revenge.

After thoroughly not caring, I went and did a bit of research on Norse mythology, thereby learning much of the backstory on which this game apparently based itself, but even then the game made changes that still elude me.  Granted, I've yet to finish the game, so perhaps all will be revealed in time, but there's a subtle difference between evoking mystery and confusion, as I believe I mentioned in a recent post (the one on The Warrior Heir, I think), and the writers for this game don't know the difference.

That, and the gameplay's not very fun, either.

I'm not saying every game has to have a well-told story. That'd be ridiculous, and more often than not all I want to do is plop down in my chair and beat up a few thugs or blow up some expensive-looking machinery or kill 2000 unfortunate Chinese men from the Han dynasty.  I'm not even saying that all games in the style of Too Human have to have engaging plots (just look at Blizzard's masterpiece, Diablo II: 95% action, 5% plot, and it's one of the best games I own).  I'm just saying that if you're going to make a game as obviously plot-centric as Too Human was, then spend the extra money on hiring writers who give a crap.  Hell, I'd have done it for free if they'd have just called me up.  I could have written something better.  Or, ideally, they'd have remade Too Human as a game version of Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight series, which I shall be reviewing next.  Stay tuned if you want to hear what a REAL story based on Norse mythology is like...

Oh. My. Gods. (Clash of the Titans, 2010 Review)

In case it hasn't yet become painfully obvious on this blog, I really like stories dealing with Greek mythology. Ever since we studied them in 5th grade, and I had to dress up as Hermes (so I made little wings for my sandals, tied a bedsheet around me, and brought my awesome White Power Ranger Staff weapon to school as my "caduceus"), I've just been hooked. As I've said before, I would have practically majored in mythology if I could have.

Let's begin with the briefest mythological lesson I can manage.

Hesiod was the first to actually record a form of creation myth involving our Olympian friends. According to him, there was Chaos, from whom came Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros, who caused couplings to happen. Eventually, Gaia popped out Ouranos (or Uranus) and had many children with him: the twelve Titans, and also the Cyclopes and the Hecatonchires (or the "Hundred-Handers"). Kronos (or Chronus) was the youngest Titan. Long story short, the Titans rose up against their oppressive father Ouranos and took control. Kronos mated with his sister Rhea, and together they produced half of the Olympian gods: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Kronos knew that his children may rise against him as he did his own father, so he ate them all, but Rhea hid Zeus away until he was old enough to fight back. A huge war ensued, but with the help of the Cyclopes and the Hecatonchires, the Olympians beat the Titans. Kronos was cut up into little tiny pieces and thrown into Tartarus (since he can't technically die). Zeus then split power between he and his two brothers: he claimed the sky, Poseidon claimed the sea and earth, and Hades claimed the underworld. The creation of man mythos changes depending on the source: sometimes Zeus made them, sometimes "the gods", and sometimes Prometheus, the son of a Titan who allied with the Olympians (and who famously gave humans fire, for which he was punished in Prometheus Bound by having a bird fly by and eat his liver everyday).

Now, take all of that information... and throw it away. Watch Clash of the Titans (1981) with the sound off. Write a screenplay, and voila! You have a new Clash of the Titans epic to end all epics.

As Professor Goodtime says, "Barf sandwich".

For the sake of time, I'm not going to go into how either movie deviates from the general myth of Perseus and Argos. There just isn't enough time, and I'm fairly convinced that the makers of the new Clash used the 1981 movie as their sole source of historical accuracy, so there's really little point.

From the outset of Clash of the Titans (2010), you know that either the writers have never actually heard of Greek mythology or they just somehow felt that they were skilled enough to justify completely changing 3,000-year-old tales. I'm guessing the latter. They begin the movie by explaining that the Titans ruled the world, but then that Zeus, Poseidon and Hades showed up and decided to battle them (which sounds less like succession mythology and more like Pokemon). The Olympian trio started to lose, but then Hades did a bit of black magic and sacrificed part of his own self to create a Titan of his own: the Kraken. This new weapon was then used to defeat the Titans. After victory, Zeus claimed the sky as his domain. Poseidon claimed the sea (Hollywood never realizes that Poseidon isn't called "The Earthshaker" because he goes clubbing on Friday nights), and Hades was tricked into becoming Lord of the Underworld, where he sits by himself for thousands of years, quietly plotting revenge against his brothers.

Now, I've never before said the full phrase from which we get "WTF", but it almost escaped my lips when I saw this opening segment.

From here you are introduced to Perseus, the hero of the story. With his parents supposedly dead, he gets taken in by a kind fisherman and his wife. Through the fisherman you're introduced to one of the main focuses of the plot: that Man is dissatisfied with the gods and doesn't feel that he needs them anymore. "One day," the fisherman says, "somebody's got to make a stand. One day, somebody's got to say... 'enough'."

I almost stood and said "enough" to the movie right there. To my everlasting shame, I kept watching.

Perseus grows into a man, and one day he and his family witness a group of soldiers ripping down a massive statue of Zeus. For some reason, this causes Hades to appear and wipe out all of the soldiers before sending some kind of Dragonball Z energy blast towards Perseus' fishing ship. His family dies, but he lives, naturally sustaining a severe hatred of the gods (by the way, the movie never properly explains, in my opinion, why humans hate the gods so much. They just do). Other soldiers appear and take him to Argos, where Queen Cassiopeia is busy claiming that the gods are useless ("The gods need us! They need our prayers! What do we need the gods for?" she says). Eventually she announces that her daughter, Andromeda, is better-looking than the gods themselves (though, strangely, she's not better-looking than the Andromeda from 1981), and again, Hades appears - why does HE care about a queen's vanity? - and says that if Andromeda isn't sacrificed to the Kraken in ten days, the big ugly monster will destroy Argos (and so will the Kraken, hey! a-boom-tsh!). Because it's important to the plot, Perseus wanders into the throne room just in time to witness this, and when Hades sees our hero, he tells the demigod of his true parentage: Zeus is Perseus' father. The king sends Perseus out to kill the Kraken, and we're on our way to more lessons in Greek heresy.

Argos becomes vaguely divided between those who wish to sacrifice Andromeda and those who wish to believe in Perseus, but you never get a clear sense that the city even knows who Perseus is, so I actually spent a large portion of the movie wondering "does this entire city want to die before sacrificing their princess?" The character of Andromeda was so underworked in this movie that I couldn't give a flying fart (to paraphrase a coworker) whether she lived or died. Perseus ventures out to save her, sure, but for NO REASON WHATSOEVER. There's no love interest there, no hopes that he himself will one day marry her and become king like in the old version. Perseus as a character pretty much represents Clash's version of Man in general: confused, muddled, angry and bitter for no clear reason, doing things that make no sense, utterly compassionless.

After Argos, Perseus faces more or less the same challenges that he faced in 1981, but with a few bizarre twists, most notably Io and the Djinn. Io was a name I recognized from myth but couldn't quite remember off the top of my head. In the movie she's a sort of guardian angel character cursed with immortality for little explainable reason who follows Perseus around (for NO explainable reason) and generally acts as a catalyst when the other characters can't figure out what to do themselves. She is, in other words, the lazy writer's dream. When Perseus and crew (he travels with a merry band of Argos marines whose sole purpose is to show you how the movie's monsters can kill people) would otherwise be clueless as to their next move, Io provides divine knowledge out of nowhere and keeps them moving. It's supremely lazy writing, for the hero never has to figure out anything on his own. Really, Io is the writer's guardian angel more than she is Perseus'.

As it turns out, Io in mythology was a woman with whom Zeus tried to, eh, forcibly mate, but she was a priestess of Hera, who subsequently turned her into a white cow. Where the filmmakers made the jump from "raped white cow" to "guardian angel love interest" I don't quite know. I half expected Perseus to call his Pegasus "Icarus" after that.

And the Djinn? They're the weirdos on the left in the picture up top. I'm pretty sure a Djinn is actually a spirit in Middle-Eastern mythology (where we get the word "genie"), but for some reason they show up here as mystic shamans who slowly replace parts of themselves with tree bark or something. They'd almost have been worth watching if they'd all been played by Robin Williams.

Why the hell either of these new characters are here is beyond me. They were two of the bigger "WTF" moments of the movie, but hey, the Djinn's glowing blue eyes looked cool, and Io provided the requisite warrior woman / eye candy, and isn't that what matters most?

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the Kraken is part of Norse mythology, not Greek. It was a big ugly sea squid who wrecked ships (one of the few things that second Pirates of the Carribean movie got right), not a city-killing, Pokemon-battling turtle with a severe tentacle problem like it is in this movie.

I don't normally comment on this kind of thing, but it's much more than the plot that bothers me about this movie: it's the sentiment. Men are angry and bitter and have no love of the gods. They constantly mock the gods, and Perseus in particular has this obsession of "being a man", even though he's a demigod and thus only half-man (perhaps he was compensating?). The gods send him gifts, like an Ancient Greek lightsaber and a cool flying horse, yet he refuses to use any of them because he wants to complete his quest "as a man". It's annoying, it's cheesy, and it completely falls apart by the end of the movie when Perseus, while still claiming to be doing the quest "as a man", finally relents and uses these godly gifts. It's like the writers wrote the whole movie with this "I can do this without the gods' help" theme, only to find that the Kraken really can't be defeated in a showy manner without these cool-looking and extra-handy gifts of the gods. The writers said, "Oh, crap" and, rather than retool the script, kept it in and just allowed Perseus to temporarily go back on everything he stands for in order to win. If that doesn't say something about today's culture, I don't know what does.

I'm fairly convinced that Hollywood doesn't know Greek myth from Christian verse. The only gods who have the slightest bit of relevance in this movie are Zeus (aka God) and Hades (aka Satan), even though Hermes and Athena were two prominent figures in the actual Perseus/Argos myth. Hollywood doesn't understand that Greek myths had nothing to do with "good vs. evil", but I suppose that Hollywood's not completely through with showing its pictures in black and white yet. Zeus acts like the Christian God does in the Flood story of Genesis (which itself, curiously, is a take on flood myths from other cultures that don't include Greek). Zeus decides that humans need to be punished for their unwillingness to worship him unless Perseus can save the day.

Why Hades is always portrayed as "evil" is easy to see: he's the God of the Dead. He rules the underworld. Satan rules Hell. Therefore, Hades = Satan, right? Perhaps when viewed through a Judeo-Christian lens, but that's completely not the character he was to the Greeks. ALL humans went to the underworld when they died - even the good ones - so Hades was, in effect, the God of Hell and Heaven. He punished the bad, but he also rewarded the good. Think of him more as a judge than a demon. In many ways, he was the kindest and most fair of all the gods, particularly between the "big three" of Zeus, Poseidon, and himself. The Greeks attributed thunder storms to Zeus and earthquakes and tsunamis to Poseidon; therefore, they had the tempestuous personalities to match. But Hades? He was usually pretty chill.

In this movie he's bent on expanding his kingdom to include the Earth, but I don't think that's how Death would really act. Other filmmakers did the same thing to the Percy Jackson movie, though in the Lightning Thief book Hades was tired, and passive, and didn't want to have to deal with the constant flow of soul-traffic headed his way. War was a strain on Hades; disasters were a nightmare. This is the same view that Markus Zusak took in his excellent novel The Book Thief, wherein Death (the narrator) is a tired old thing who only manages to stay sane in his depressing job by observing colors. Brilliant book. You should read it. So should Hollywood.

But they won't.

They're too comfortable with the simplicity of the good vs. evil, God vs. Satan, Harry Potter vs. Voldemort (did I mention that the guy who plays Voldemort, Ralph Fiennes, plays Hades here? He does so brilliantly, I must admit; his voice feels old and whispery, like he himself is on the verge of death. The poor guy's becoming type-cast as modern-day Satans). Hollywood doesn't understand Greek mythology and its chaotic nature, the way gods turn on each other and each other's children, the way that there was never intended to be a strictly "evil" or "good" god, or the way that heroes were heroes because they did supernatural feats with the gods' help. That doesn't make sense to Hollywood, I guess. Their wars can only have two sides, black vs. white, and you aren't allowed to cheer for both. Maybe someday they'll begin to see colors, like Death in The Book Thief.

When I came out of this movie, I tried to think of something optimistic to say for my review. The best that I came up with was "it's the best movie I've ever seen in which Sam Worthington plays a reluctant hero who spends 3/4ths of the final battle sequence astride a winged beast", as a playful jab at Avatar, a movie of which I am not especially fond, to say the least. But as soon as I thought that, I realized a terrible, terrible truth. It wasn't right. I didn't really think that. It forced me to say something which I NEVER thought I'd say. Avatar was better. Oh, gods, now I have to go wash my hands and burn my keyboard. Ugh.

Oh, and this movie employs the "shaky cam" effect in all of its action scenes. This can be done well (see: the Bourne movies), but usually, as is the case with this movie, it's a sad, sorry gimmick that serves two functions: covering up the actors' inability to do coordinated fight scenes, and making the viewer too dizzy and sick to care. Watching it in 3D - and apparently it wasn't filmed for that medium - only makes it worse. If you MUST see this movie, see it in 2D, or better yet, wait until it's out on video and RiffTrax has had a chance to thoroughly mock it.

A Paltry Inheritance (Eregon, Eldest, and Brisingr Reviews)

I started writing my first book when I was sixteen. Seems like ages ago now, both in years and maturity. More has happened to me since then than I could possibly describe. Suffice to say, nowadays my writing is almost as different from its old self as I am.

So it was with a certain degree of understanding that I took to Christopher Paolini's The Inheritance Cycle series, in which he, by means of his parents, self-published the first book, Eregon, when he was but 19 years old. In this I truly do have to commend him. He took Eregon around to over a hundred local libraries and schools and spoke about writing while simultaneously providing copies of his book, and eventually, a major publisher took it up, and away he went. The second book, Eldest, came out three years later (2005), and Brisingr was another 3 years after that (2008), meaning that odds are good that the fourth and final book in the series will arrive sometime in the Fall of 2011, though that's purely a guess.

So what is The Inheritance Cycle about, exactly? A young farmboy, Eregon, discovers a dragon egg in the forest near his home and soon must flee the soldiers of the evil King Galbatorix, who have burned down his farm and killed his uncle. He is led to a secret base of rebels by the old storyteller Brom, who, as it turns out, was actually a Dragon Rider himself before Galbatorix and the "Foresworn" killed his dragon and practically ALL of the other Riders in existence. During his journey, Eregon must learn magic and what it means to be a rider if he wants to have any chance of toppling the evil king, for he is the last of the free Riders, and if he falls, King Galbatorix will surely take over the world and enslave all humanity (and elvenkind and dwarvenkind and probably hobbits, too, though as of the end of the third book I haven't technically heard the word "hobbit" mentioned).

Does this sound a little familiar? Let me put it this way: I very nearly called this post "Star Wars: Attack of the Cloned Plotline". Just change around a few names (Eregon-Luke, Galbatorix-Emperor Palpatine, Dragon Rider-Jedi, Brom-Obi-Wan) and you're good to go. And is it really such a coincidence that Paolini has released all of his books so far 3 years apart... just like the Star Wars movies?

Inheritance Episode IV: A New Hope

I made the great mistake of purchasing the audio book version of Eregon, for at the time I frequently drove between Dallas, my hometown, and Austin, my college town, which is 3 hours and 15 minutes south along I35, and while I love my music selection, I needed something a bit more stimulating to keep me awake for the drive. So it was in Waco, Temple, Troy (minus the horses), Hillsboro, Belton, and my personal favorite, Waxahachie, that I first heard Paolini's initial foray into the wide world of novels. I say that buying the audio book was a mistake for two reasons: 1) it was much more expensive than the book, and 2) the narrator was pretty atrocious. His "voice" for Saphira, Eregon's dragon, is a baritone impression of Yoda, and his voice for Solembum - a werecat whose purpose still eludes me - actually IS an impression of Yoda. Thinking about it still makes me cringe, and I understand that the audio tape for Eldest wasn't any better.

As for the book itself, it's a mixed bag. Eregon is a young adult adventure of middling quality, full of lengthy history lessons of the world of Alagasia and very, very predictable stereotypes. I don't entirely mean that as a bad thing; it is what it is. This is a story written by a young man not yet old enough to drink; the advantage here is that he is close to the same age as his inexperienced protagonist; the disadvantage is the very same fact. You get the sense that Paolini not only was influnced by J.R.R. Tolkien but wanted to be him, but, as he was only 19 and had never before written a full novel, there was no chance in hell that he would fully pull it off, But believe me, he tried. There are random moments of poetics that don't flow as smoothly as they should; I understand the usefulness of a well-placed simile or metaphor, but when every single tear or body of water is described as a "diamond" or "pearl" or some other crystalline entity, the imagery falters. His attempts at lyrical brilliance just fall short; frankly, each and every passage that contains one would have been better without it.

I really mean it when I say that these books are the plot of Star Wars plopped down, like fresh buffalo chips, into the Lord of the Rings universe. Alagasia may as well be called Middle-earth (for instance, Middle-earth has the Haradrim Desert. Alagasia? The Hadarac Desert). The Dragon Riders even carried special swords with blades to match the color of their dragon, which sounds suspiciously like lightsabers to me (especially when you have a blue dragon, as Eregon does). Dragon Riders can use magic, which is a huge focal point for the entire series, and this is a good thing, because Paolini's magical concepts are generally far better than his plot.

Inheritance Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

It's clear in these books that the actual storyline of The Inheritance Cycle is little more than a vehicle for Paolini's imagination: the use and history of magic, dozens of pointless legends and tales of old, and an endless stream of rituals. Characters constantly talk Eregon's ear off, which is okay for him, because he's "always asking questions", as Brom puts it, but it wears on you quickly.

Eldest picks up right after the finale of Eregon, during which the rebel base (Farthen-Dur, which I call Yavin IV) comes under attack by Urgals (Uruk-Hai from LOTR). The good guys won, of course, though at considerable cost. But when one of the primary leaders suddenly gets whacked hardly five pages into the book, things begin to change (that particular scene reminded me of the second Mortal Kombat movie, where Johnny Cage gets his neck broken by Shao Kahn about 3 minutes in. Hated it then, and I hated this, too).

Eldest is easily the weakest of the series (though, optimist that I am, I'm hopeful about Book 4). In Eldest, you receive chapters from the point of view of two other characters, Roran - Eregon's cousin - and Nasuada - the leader of the Varden (aka Rebel Alliance). This was a good move on Paolini's part, partially because certain plot points wouldn't have made sense without their views, and partially because Eregon's plotline in Eldest is, shall we say, less than exciting. He leaves the Varden and journeys to the Elves to train with an old, hidden Dragon and his Rider, Yoda. Actually, it's Oromis, but you get the idea. Meanwhile Roran, his characterless love interest Katrina, and their village come under attack by the Empire, while Nasuada experiences the difficulties of leadership. I was disappointed to learn that Roran never got encased in carbonite, meaning that Paolini only has one book left to make his Star Wars analogy complete.

It's hard to say much about plot because there is so little of it after the end of Eregon. Where Eregon spent most of its time in human cities, Eldest is almost entirely set in Dwarven and Elven lands, and believe me, Eregon makes it a point to learn as much as he can, whether you want to hear it or not. Human cities didn't require pages and pages of history and explanation. Dwarven and Elven cities, apparently, did. A fundamental shift happens between Eregon and Eldest; it's as if Paolini changed sub-genres of fantasy from young-adult adventure to... I don't know, exactly. Young-adult high fantasy, perhaps, only I feel like that gives it too much credit. For some reason, characters begin to speak in a more eloquent manner than they did in Eregon. This is particularly obvious with the Carvahall villagers and Roran, who all speak as though written by a 15-year-old told to imitate Shakespeare without over-using "thou" and "thee" and other lovely relics from the English language's past. But then, out of nowhere, you get one of the most mind-boggling moments I've yet experienced in a book, where one villager, when told that they must use a few barges as a means of escape, exclaims, "Barges! We don't want no stinking barges!" I wish I were joking.

Anyway, the first half of Eldest is pretty painful. Eregon takes over 250 pages to reach the Elves and begin his training with Yoda Rider, and Roran uses that time to get pissed off at everybody and receive similar sentiments before, out of nowhere, dishing out a stirring speech that rouses the entire village into action. The second half picks up only slightly, with Eregon training (you'll learn more about magic than you ever wanted) and Roran fleeing to the Varden with 300 villagers in tow.

Though the two protagonists had always been as brothers to each other, the circumstances of Eldest begin to push them wider and wider apart on the morality scale, as Eregon becomes a vegetarian with the Elves while Roran - oh noes! - has to kill a few innocent guards in a town to ensure the survival of his own. The separation here is predictable, but not terribly played out.

The biggest problem with Eldest, though, is its romance, or, to be more technically accurate, its lack thereof. For reasons unknown, Eregon continually pursues Arwen - excuse me, Arya - even though the elf makes it abundantly clear that she wants nothing to do with him romantically. What baffled me was that Paolini never gives me, as the reader, a good reason to care for Arya myself. Sure she can kick ass, and I've little doubt that she's very pretty, but I just can't figure out why Eregon would care so much for her. I just don't see it. Roran has the same problem: he is utterly obsessed with Katrina (though thankfully she loves him back, unlike Arya), but the reader is given absolutely no reason to feel the same way. It's like the author just expects us to love these women because his characters do and leaves it at that. Katrina does nothing but fuel Roran's actions and look pretty; when she finally gets kidnapped (as we all knew she would) I was actually relieved because I knew that now the plot was going to do something. Sure enough, Roran & company packed up and left town in practically the next chapter.

I wouldn't exactly have so much of a problem with this if it didn't play such an integral part of the narrative: Roran thinks of nothing but Katrina and the number of men he's killed (he literally keeps count until he kills so many that he loses track). His obsession with Katrina is later remarked as legendary by other characters, but without Katrina herself showing some personality, he may as well be obsessed over a dog, or a basketball, that the Empire has taken from him. Perhaps Paolini meant for him to be a sort of kickass, rugged, manly man like so many action heroes of the 1980's. The author tries to play him gruff, but when he still speaks and thinks with this awkward high-fantasy attempt at speech that has a tendency to go on for paragraphs at a time, "gruff" ceases to be an apt term, if it ever was to begin with. If Roran's meant to be an ideal of manliness, then culture as we know it may be in for some rough times.

Inheritance Episode VI: Return of the Dragon Riders... Part 1

I debated whether to continue reading the series after Eldest, which concluded with a plot twist so irritating, so utterly jaw-dropping, that I actually recall muttering, "Seriously? Seriously" when I read it. Let's just say that for all of Eldest I feared a "Luke, I am your father" moment, for you know so little about Eregon's proper parentage all this time, and here at the end of Eldest: The Empire Strikes Back, I got it. I can't particularly tell you why I bothered to read Brisingr. Maybe it was because my wife owns it and hasn't read it yet (making this practically the first book EVER that I've read before her).

Mercifully, Brisingr isn't as bad as Eldest, which is kind of like saying that dying by falling off a cliff doesn't sound as bad as drowning in a sewer. In Brisingr, both Eregon and Nasuada (who, aside from Saphira, seems to be the only female character worth reading about) are almost perpetually bogged down in politics, meaning that while you aren't treated to quite so many pointless legends and myths, you are instead forced to slog through endless debates by people who have the uncanny ability to make their points in at least three different ways before letting someone else speak. Maybe it's a cultural thing in Alagasia. Believe me, though, the legends and myths are still there. I've never encountered a book series with so many characters who love the sounds of their own voices before, and I've read all of the Song of Fire and Ice books to date. Everyone discusses every possible course of action before taking it, but the only one who really sees any sort of direct fighting is Roran, and even then he suffers through some mindnumbingly predictable plotlines, mostly in the form of "here's your new leader, Roran. He's a jerk, and he'll invariably order you to do something that will get everyone killed, so you'll have to choose between insubordination and death." "Cake or death," I can hear Eddie Izzard saying. "Um, cake please." Roran's scene of insubordination involves an action sequence so unbelievable that, again, I very nearly put the book down and gave up on the whole affair. It affirmed my suspicion that the author views Roran as some kind of ubermench.

Or, as my friend who wishes to be known as "Professor Goodtimes" sometimes refers to himself as, the "manliest of all mans".

Essentially, Roran kills so many people that he fights atop a hill of corpses that grows and grows until all enemies are defeated. In all, he slays something like 197 (one of the other soldiers in his troop aparently had nothing better to do but sit there and count the number of morons who aparently didn't know how to shoot a friggen bow). It was stupid and amazingly unbelievable, and this is from a guy who plays Dynasty Warriors religiously.

The best part of the book actually came from a few chapters told from a whole new point of view, which I won't spoil for those of you who wish to go against my will and read these books anyway. Those of you who fit in this category, though, beware: there is a chapter, called "Mind Over Metal", which captures the very essence of what I'm trying to tell you about Paolini's writing. In it, Eregon forges a sword. That's the whole chapter. He forges a sword. That doesn't sound too bad, you say? Try this: the chapter is 16 pages long. That's about 6000 words, or 3 full-length essays for your average university. As I read, I kept waiting for the punchline, for something relevant to happen, but it never came. When I finally finished the chapter, I felt like I'd been mugged. Paolini had just stolen 16 pages-worth of my life, and I wanted them back, but there's no way. I can't turn back time and undo this atrocity on my life that Paolini has caused. I read somewhere that the chapter was inspired by something called The Craft of the Japanese Sword. I say it was inspired by the little-known book - written by Paolini, I shouldn't wonder - called How to Lose Your Audience.

Yet, I'll probably read Book 4 when it comes out. It's like watching a train wreck, or a soap opera, or Catwoman. I know it's terrible, but I just can't help myself. Read these books only if you really, REALLY have nothing better to do and have somehow read every single other book in the store, even Moby Dick and those crapfest prequel novels to the Dragon Age videogames. I won't say that the books of The Inheritance Cycle are some of the worst books that I've ever read, nor even that they are the worst fantasy novels (the winner there goes to this vampire... thing... that I encountered back in 2004. I promise I'm not talking about Twilight; it's just that I don't remember the name and probably burned the book after I read it). But know that if you're looking for, oh I don't know, plot, then try something else. Anything.

Oh, and the character Angela the Herbalist should be shot. Immediately. She's an "eccentric" person who talks to Eregon at considerable length about her theory that toads (or frogs; I can't remember/care which) don't actually exist. You constantly look for some semblance of truth in the random things she says, but I really don't think it's there. I think most of what she says is the author's meager attempt at humor, like the "We don't want no stinking barges!" line (which is on page 413 of the 2005 Knopf hardback, if you don't believe me). I hated her so much that I actually had a hard time being around a friend of mine named Angela for fear that I would take my anger out on her.