It had to happen. Walden Media, purveyors of such Christian-minded entertainments such as The Chronicles Of Narnia; The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe and Bridge To Terabithia, have finally come a-cropper with their latest fantasy epic. Where those films, particularly Terabithia, managed to function as old-fashioned family fare and decent movies, The Dark Is Rising, an adaptation of Susan Cooper’s massively influential children’s classic, is a big, plodding dud that bares little or no resemblance to the book that inspired it.
If you look very hard, the bones of the original story are there, albeit in a bastardised form. On his 14th birthday (he’s 11 in the book) Will Stanton (Ludwig) discovers that he is one of a group of immortal time-travellers charged with keeping the forces of darkness in check. For no good reason, the character and his entire family are now Americans living in England. Fair enough. We might have persevered with such tinkering if it wasn’t for, well, nearly everything else.
You see the thing about Ms. Cooper’s work is that the story is the fantasy, an imaginative marriage of Arthurian legend and ancient English mythology. Not here, it’s not. When we encounter, say, Wayland Smith in the film, the blacksmith of folk songs and legend is stripped of his pagan origins to make room for the usual rubbish about dads who don’t pay enough attention and testy teens. Indeed, our only glimpses of the book’s carefully fashioned universe are proffered through chunks of unwieldy dialogue dumped in the unfortunate laps of Ian McShane and Christopher Eccleston. These normally distinguished actors are left to choke and chew on the hour-and-a-half’s worth of exposition required of them. Quick. Does anybody here know the Heimlich manoeuvre?
Unhappily, if it wasn’t for these fellows saying things like – “Give me the signs! We only have three days left” – one would scarcely know that anything was happening at all.
The uneventful script is matched by direction that veers between the totally random and the utterly pointless. Helmsman David L. Cunningham, an evangelical Christian and wonk for Youth With A Mission, would do well to take his snout out of his bible and head on back to film school.