Wack magic

>> The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising is an
inauspicious start to a fantasy franchise

by MARK SLUTSKY

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a lonely kid, living with his family somewhere in the British Isles, learns to his great surprise that he’s in fact the bearer of great power, the key figure in a battle between good and evil that’s been going for like...ever. It’s inevitable that multi-part fantasy epics based on bestsellers have come out of the woodwork since Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter movies made so much cash, and as a rule I don’t have a problem with that, as it means Philip Pullman’s brilliant His Dark Materials series will be hitting screens soon.

Hopefully those movies won’t suck, because The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, based on the novel by Susan Cooper, is a grade-A turkey. Based on the second book in Cooper’s well-regarded Dark Is Rising franchise—I mean series—The Seeker tells the story of young Will Stanton (Alexander Ludwig), an American kid living with his boisterous family in England.

Things seem to be getting a little weird around Christmas time—psychedelic spirals appearing before him, security guards turning into birds—and the kid soon learns that he’s actually the Seeker of the title, destined to find a bunch of magic gimcracks and defeat the Rider (Christopher Eccleston), who represents ultimate badassery on Earth, or something like that.

He’s guided by a well-meaning but frankly ineffective group of “Elders,” played by HBO all-stars Ian McShane and Frances Conroy, as well as several men with beards. The thing of it is, the Seeker’s quest itself just isn’t that exciting—it feels a lot like a Legend of Zelda game, with Ludwig stepping into various other points in time to retrieve his precious glowy stone things and stick them on his magic belt.

I can’t speak for the book, which I assume is somewhat good, but the movie displays a depressing lack of creativity. I’m fairly sure that nowhere in the original series did the hero sit down and Google the phrase “the light and the dark.” And his foes are hardly intimidating: a gothy dude on a horse, a bunch of snakes, a huffy Viking in a canoe. With little characterization, a flat story and no flashy visuals, The Seeker just doesn’t make that magic happen.

The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
opens this Friday, Oct. 5

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