Two Days…

… since the opening day of the most despised film in my entire life (and that’s not a hyperbole). Usually when I think a film is bad, I’ll just move on and forget, but I’ve never hated one with such passion, especially considering that it wasn’t released yet at the time I started hating it. My utmost regret is that it’s being made at all, but since I can’t do anything about it, I’ll just derive my pleasure on how it tanked in the US cinemas and received generally bad reviews. Really, that’s the best possible outcome for now, since if the film is a success, they might make sequels and because they’ve diverged so much from the book for this film, the future sequels will be unrecognisable as well. Except the only downside is that the film might turn people off from picking up the book, which is a shame really.

For those of you who have no idea of what I’m talking about, it’s a horrible adaptation (and I used the word loosely here, if you can call writing a new story altogether an adaptation) of The Dark Is Rising, a book which is part of the series that’s also called The Dark Is Rising. You can read my previous rant about it here. But really, it’s such a hatchet job at an adaptation that no self-respecting fans of the book or Susan Cooper (the author) will not be pissed off at it. You can even tell things aren’t going well since they changed the title of the film twice after they released the trailer. From initially ‘The Dark Is Rising’, they changed it to ‘The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising’ and finally, a few days before the film is released, it changed again to just ‘The Seeker’. My assumption is that after reading the book properly, as well as other books in the series (no, they haven’t read the other books in the series while filming it, so they had no idea of what's going on in the story), they figured that they have no similarities at all with the film that putting ‘The Dark Is Rising’ in the title is nothing less than fraudulence. Or maybe they just got so many hate mails from fans of the book to change the title.

For now, I really hope that they will stop making sequels, and that someday someone will buy the rights from them and make a truly proper adaptation of my favourite book from childhood, the way it’s meant to be.

Yaz.