So You Think That Was Good Do You?

Hello and welcome to So You Think That Was Good Do You, a podcast where we take a look
back at the films from your childhood and question the absurdity of their universes.
My name is Evan and as always I'm joined by Sam and Carl.
How you doing boys?
Oh, pretty low energy today.
Yeah, that was a struggle.
Yeah, the reason for that will become clear as time goes on, I'm sure.
How are you, Carl?
I was feeling alright until I found out how pissed off you boys were at me for this one.
It's the rocketeer all over again.
You feel good about yourself, do you mate?
Yeah, you know how to pick a stinker, but we'll see how this goes.
And this one reeked, this week Carl picked Eragon, 2006 famously bad movie starring...
We knew it was going to suck.
Ed Spielers, that is his name, Jeremy Irons and John Markovich are really the only notable
people in it.
I thought there would be more to talk about than just how bad this movie was.
You see, I disagree.
I don't think this is a bad movie because talking about bad movies is fun.
This is just a very... it's a movie movie.
I definitely watched it and then it wasn't on anymore.
It did happen.
Oh God, that feeling did not come quick enough.
It was on for a long time.
Yeah, I started this movie at one o'clock this afternoon, at three o'clock I was forty
minutes in.
I don't know how I watched it.
I don't know how.
I started it about the same time as you.
I couldn't usually, with the movies that we watch, if they're bad, I'll break them
up into two sections and get my energy back.
But for this one, I just wanted it to be over as soon as possible.
You marathoned it.
I was getting to the point where I was genuinely worried I wouldn't have it watched by the
time we start recording and I'd give myself seven hours.
I need to watch it at 1.5 speed, that's the secret.
Well, shall we, as usual, get started with the plots and up?
Eragon, a poor farm boy, lives in, oh God, I knew I was going to trip over this, Alegisia.
Alegisia.
Alegisia.
Alegisia.
Eragon, a poor farm boy, lives in Alegisia, a kingdom ruled by Galbathorix, a powerful
but evil monarch.
This is my issue with this movie.
It's just all bullshit like this.
They don't spring off the page, do they?
No.
They don't.
They don't.
Eragon discovers a beautiful stone that he soon realises is a dragon's egg.
When the creature hatches, Eragon sits forth on a path that could restore the glory of
his homeland's legendary dragon riders and perhaps, oh the fro, that guy's name I just
said.
Oh, it's just all fantasy stuff.
Wow.
No, he winds for an hour and 40 minutes.
Well, I don't think that that, he said that he, what was it, set out to overthrow the
king or something.
Yeah.
My, one of my main issues with the film is that he doesn't seem to have any reason for
doing anything.
He's just sort of along for his own ride.
Yeah, he gets the thing.
There's no motivation for any of the plot.
Well, the motivation is people keep telling him how great and important he is.
And so he just carries on following people around until he accidentally ends up in a
fight.
We've all been there.
Pretty much.
I hated how whiny he was every, but I don't want to fly.
Oh God.
I know he's supposed to be 17, but still he's not five.
I do wonder though, because last week you called this a cinematic spit in the face.
Because I think we all have fond memories of the book this comes from, but I don't know
if this is actually much better than the book.
And if we were just 12 years old, I think we'll get into that a bit more, but I don't
think all of the blame can be laid on the film for how bad the plot is.
I have never read the book, so I have nothing to compare it to.
If it is anything like this movie, I will never read them, unless the characters and
plot are radically different.
Those books will remain unread.
I mean, I can, you know, I can answer the question for you now.
Don't read them.
Okay, good.
Thank you.
Books written by children, made for children, made for a child, made for other children.
He was the age of this character when he started writing the book, wasn't he?
I think he was like 17 or 18.
He published it when he was under 20, I think.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Before we start, because maybe you'll be able to clear this up for me, Sam.
The King isn't in the first book, right?
We don't have random appearances of John Malkovich playing John Malkovich.
John Malkovich doesn't show up in the first book.
The, no, the, I mean, look, I read it at the same time you did.
So it's been well over a decade, potentially, I don't know how long it was.
Getting close to two decades since I read it.
So I don't remember it word for word, but I'm pretty sure the King only gets kind of
name dropped.
Yeah, I feel like he's more of a mention throughout the first and maybe even second.
The pacing of the whole first book is a hell of a lot slower than this film.
And that may shock you, I'm pretty sure at the end of the first book, all they've done
is walk for a really long time.
Whereas on this one, they ride on the back of horses for a really long time.
Yeah.
There's so many shots of just, oh, they're on horses again.
Are they?
Where are we going now?
Well, should we get started then?
Should we dive right in?
Yes.
I mean, I'm happy to talk about how I am again, if you want.
No?
Well, I can kick this off.
No, no, I can kick this off.
Fine, okay.
Go for it, mate.
Should I let you do it, shouldn't I?
I don't know why I fought you for that.
This is my episode.
So yeah, we open up, we've got sweeping shots of Middle Earth and a voice over that's describing
the land's history, so we've got a land that used to be watched over by dragon-riding Jedi,
but then they were betrayed and overthrown by Emperor Palpatorex, who now rules over
everything and crushed the Vardan who are our freedom-fighting rebels.
Yeah, so I want to, the first thing I want to bring into question is that the way that
this is presented to us is that in the utopian past, the land was ruled over by a load of
men on dragons who wielded supreme power over the peasants below.
So far, this sounds pretty fucking awful.
The regime change that's described is that one of the pricks kills the other pricks and
then takes over all their land and everyone's like, oh, isn't this awful?
I preferred it when Jon was the guy on the back of the dragon burning our village.
It's all shit, I don't know, it just, it doesn't seem that great.
No, for the everyday man in Middle Earth, nothing changed, there's just less dragons
flying about, which is probably nicer.
I mean, presumably less skirmishes and fights going on between all the different dickheads
on dragons.
I mean, the only reason that we accept that Galvatorex is evil is that they say he's evil
and also he sits in a really dark room.
Yeah, and John Markovich plays him very evil.
Everyone in-
He does play him evil, but yeah, he doesn't actually do anything.
No, no.
And I was going to mention this later.
I don't know why other people are afraid of him, he's just a dude.
I know he's got some of that magic stuff, but his lieutenant, Durza?
Durza, yeah.
Right, yeah.
He's like an immortal sorcerer, why is he taking orders from this bald bloke?
Because he's Jon Malkovich.
Well, yeah.
But I mean, this probably isn't the week to go into it, but I found the choice of words
in this voiceover just stood out to me where he says that they were there to protect and
serve when he was speaking about the dragonriders.
I caught that.
That changes with context.
It really does.
And that's all I have to say about that.
And I've tried to stop myself saying so, but apparently I don't know how to start a sentence
without saying so.
Therefore...
Hang on, I'll get on chat GPT and get synonyms.
You don't need to chat with GPT.
You don't need the world's most advanced AI to Google synonyms.
So I was going to say fast forward, but now we're on the ground.
Arya and some members of the Vardan, they have stolen a stone from the king and he wants
it back.
We know this because he says, I suffer without my stone.
I want it back.
Do not prolong my suffering.
Who calls it a stone?
He does.
It's weird.
I'm not supposed to know it's an egg yet.
Well, the camera's a bear, he calls it a stone.
You say egg looking, it looks like a big Viagra pill, it looks nothing like a fucking egg.
I wouldn't know.
See she's being pursued by Dersa and her Vardan companions are killed, she's got nowhere
to run and he tells her if she returns the stone that he'll let her live, but the Sith
cannot be trusted so she magics said stone away and many, many miles away Aragon, a young
farm boy is out hunting and the stone appears before him.
The stone, so he had an arrow kind of notched ready to fire a deer and then the stone pops
in to place in front of him as he fires the arrow and hits a tree.
So did she send a tree as well, because he was aiming at the deer.
Maybe he's just a really bad shot, I don't know.
Maybe she swapped the stone with the deer.
The magic in this world we're always told is that everything has to have an equal and
opposite so you have to use the same amount of energy to do a certain thing so maybe yeah
there had to be a swap so she gave away the stone and in her hand appeared a full size
male deer.
I don't know.
But yeah, he takes the stone I guess as a consolation prize.
And so another thing that I wanted to mention about that, she teleports it directly in front
of him and at the time I was like okay so she that was done with intention I'm guessing
she sent it to this kid who she knows is spoiler alert, I think he's like, he's important.
He is the destined.
His name is one letter removed from dragon.
He's really close to dragon so she has a feeling and I think in the books he ended up maybe
being the son of the king or something.
I think he was Jeremy Ion's son but it's been so long.
He's someone's son, we're all someone's son, well not us three but everyone else is someone's
son.
Most people have that and he has one.
I assumed that she sent it to him with intention but then they talk about it later on and she
doesn't seem to have any idea, she doesn't really know who he is, she doesn't know anything
about it so I'm like so she just randomly yeeted it up in a direction and it happened
to land in front of the son of the evil king who is destined to, I don't know man that's
a bit convenient.
I assumed it was like sent to him on purpose, yeah like it was the egg nuva, he was the
rider.
It's been a long time but yeah I don't think it was intentional, I think it was a fate wielded
sort of scenario, let's not dig too much into this plot.
Any other movie I'd be bothered by the contrivance but the rest of this movie is about to happen
so I don't care too much.
He's taken his stone as a consolation prize and he's gone back to his village which I
didn't bother to learn the name of and he's looking to trade it.
So this stone is huge sapphire blue thing and it's like nothing anyone's ever seen before
and he goes to the butchers to try and trade it for a rump steak as far as I can tell.
He goes to swap it for one bit of meat, mate you're a fucking hunter, there was a deer
right there.
He was supposed to bring back a deer for his uncle and cousin and instead is bringing back
one piece of steak.
How did you want to come back with one piece of steak, well no no I found an enormous sapphire
and I traded it for this steak.
Now this kid will be sticking an arrow in the steak and telling them they hunted it,
he's all tall.
The butcher seems semi-interested until Erdogan tells him that he found this stone in the
spine, we never hear of what that is again but the butcher now wants nothing to do with
it.
Yeah, yeah so he acts really like put out by the spine being mentioned and he's supposed
to assume it's some like dark forest he's supposed to stay away from but never mentioned
not important.
The rest of the movie takes place in forests but not that one.
Probably.
Yeah, so we get our first introduction to Brom and then Erdogan heads home, Erdogan
lives on a farm.
He does.
Yep, Erdogan, I don't know why I started it like that.
Try not to say so.
This shows how lacking I was for notes but my mind was kind of drifting as I was watching
this.
I feel like this is a cliche, a fantasy stuff, the farm boy air quotes is always, you know,
it's sort of synonymous with kind of poverty and low class, have you met any fucking farm
boy?
Yeah, rich as fuck, they're the poshest motherfuckers around anyway, yeah, Erdogan lives on a farm.
So yeah, energy stuff went straight down there didn't it lives on a farm with his uncle
and cousin, written as Roragon, his cousin who he has a special relationship with.
Oh, it's very sexual, isn't it?
Based on, based on how kind of sexually charged this little tussle is.
Yeah, the little topless wrestle.
He ends up with his head right in his gooch.
We've seen a very important relationship develop, the play fighting with their wooden sticks
and wrestling and you can see how close they are and how important they are to each other
and then Roragon says, well, I'm 18 now, so I have to leave and then he's just gone.
I've got to leave for a bit of guards catch me for what I've been doing with you.
This isn't legal.
This is not legal anymore, I'm 18.
We don't actually know what his brother leads to do, by the way, no, just kind of says,
I'm leaving cousin, not brother, it'd be weird if it was brother, it was still weird, yeah.
He says he's old enough to enlist, but that he doesn't say that's what he's doing.
No.
Maybe that's why he's going away.
Right.
He leaves because he doesn't want to.
Yeah, everyone who reaches whatever age he is, I think he's 18, he's pretty much forced
to enlist in the military, so he's going.
So we get one scene where we learn he's very important to Roragon and then he's just like,
oh, so I'll be going now.
Will he pop up in later scenes?
Will he fuck?
Will he pop up in the sequel?
Plenty of, plenty of, plenty of what he's popped up.
Very good.
So yeah, I've just, I've just written here, Roran is gone, but the impression he made
on us as viewers will remain, it has been emotional.
Absolutely point.
I swear he was more important in the book.
He's also not in any way distinguishable from Aragon, they are just copy-paste versions
of each other.
I'm glad he left because I'd have been confused the entire movie, which one was which.
In the two minutes he was there, I was confused.
Yeah.
I thought Aragon's leaving now.
Oh no, it's the other one.
Roran.
Roragon.
Roragon.
I'd never realized Aragon is just one letter removed from Dragon and that's all I can
think about now.
The next letter in the alphabet, it was, by the way, it was 100% a typo that the author
made when he was typing the title.
He was just going to call the book Dragon.
Well, is that really that surprising when you consider the story?
No.
He fucked up on the first letter, so good.
So Aragon is now alone and lonely.
He's in his barn with his big blue stone and it starts to shake and crack and out of it
explodes a little blue dragon.
I don't know about you boys, but I still wasn't sure what was going on here.
But luckily Aragon says, not a stone, an egg.
That cleared everything up for me.
To be fair, everybody's been calling it a stone, even the guy who it belonged to who
knows it's an egg, so I'm glad it explained it to us.
Can you imagine how much he wants it back now?
You mean that wasn't a fucking stone?
I suffer without my egg.
What do you boys think of the Dragon design?
I know we haven't got it grown up yet and I know you think I'm going to lean into this
chat GPT stuff.
I hate it.
It looks like a Moomin.
Do you know what that is?
It does.
I mean, I liked it until you pointed that out.
Okay, it is a little Moomin-esque, but I mean, I still don't mind it.
It's fine.
The CGI is good enough, I thought, but I'm impressed with the design.
A little blue dragon, it looked like a little blue dragon.
It didn't bring me out of the movie.
That was already out.
So Ergon reaches down to touch the little baby dragon and the little baby Moomin and
there's a flash of blue light and he then has a little poo emoji scar that appears on
his hand, so now he's a dragon rider.
And I don't know if this is something that actually happens or if it's, yeah.
It seems like everyone is then informed that he exists now as they all wake up, put the
same time.
Are you in her cell, brom in his fucking hovel, and Gal-Galbatorik still just sat on his throne
barrel.
Look at it, just leaning his head on the- I guess he sleeps there, too.
I feel like John Malkovich was like, fine, I'll do the movie, but I'll do it all in this
one room.
Let's get it out of the way and I'm off.
Oh, he did a days walk of work.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
He recorded all of his lines in a straight 10 minutes, guaranteed.
Okay, but I'm playing myself, I'm doing it in a day, but I want the full rate still.
And I want to call it a stone, I'm not calling it an egg.
No, no, no, no, I won't say it.
Was that specifically for this movie or is that in all his movie context?
I will not say it.
Truth, find me a video of him saying egg.
Oh, he's got to have said it in of Mice and Men.
Was he in of Mice and Men?
He's the one who gets shot, innit?
He's Lenny.
Yeah.
Oh, jeez.
He's not.
What?
I mean, I haven't seen the film, but he doesn't seem like the right casting for Lenny.
Oh, he doesn't seem like the right casting for Lenny.
What about King Palpatorex, the-
This is the scariest man in the whole of Middle Earth, played by John Malkovich in a dress
that's a bit too big for him, sat on his cardboard throne.
I'm really trying to think of other roles that he's had.
The only one that I can think of is Johnny English.
Yeah, that's really the only one I'm aware of.
He's in that space force thing with Steve Carell.
Does he mention eggs?
He doesn't, no.
Oh.
He's coming together, boys.
So-
So-
Is it so?
Fuck.
Galpatorex sends Derser to kill-
Oh, fuck it up.
The whole name.
Derser.
All the names just stop you dead.
They're all so awful.
Yeah.
Derser.
Sadly Derser.
Galpatorex sends Derser to kill Aragon before he can make it to the Varden and possibly
inspire a new rebellion, apparently, because he is that impressive, he's been told.
Just after he wakes up from getting his brand on his hand, he tries to feed the dragon some
milk.
Yeah.
And he's going back to this, because the way that he tries to do this is he empties
a bucket of milk into a bag and then slowly drips it onto the dragon's head.
Boy, what the fuck are you doing?
Is that- what is that?
I guess it was to drip feed it, but I understand that the dragon could have licked out of the
bucket.
Also, he knows what dragons are, right?
It's not like this is the first time he's heard of dragons.
They aren't legends in this world.
He knows they eat meat, surely.
He said- I mean, doesn't he say something like he thinks it's a bird or some shit?
In a world where dragons actually exist, it's baffling that people wouldn't know what dragons
look like.
Moomins.
Shit, it's not a Moomin.
So where are we now?
They-
You know what?
Who knows, Evan?
We never know.
We never realised that I start so many sentences with back at because we just bounce around
so much.
Back at this place.
Back at that place.
So back at the village, Aragon, Braum, a bunch of villagers we never really learn about
all hanging out at night in the centre of the village and Braum is for some reason repeating
his monologue from the opening of the movie, which is just pissing off the army guys that
are hanging around and inspiring Aragon, who now knows that his dragon is a dragon and
not a bird or a Moomin.
And so he's now gone and he's going to teach his dragon to fly.
That's what he's doing.
He's back home.
He's trying to teach it to fly.
He's going to be a dragon rider.
Sorry, this has just occurred to me.
Braum does his monologue about dragon riders and shit.
We've seen Galvatorex.
We know that he's not that old.
He's like 40s, maybe early 50s as stretch.
It kind of been that long ago that all of this shit went down.
No.
Yeah.
That's why when he's doing his monologue about there used to be dragon riders who roamed
this land.
Is everyone like, dude, it just happened.
Why are you telling us?
We know.
Where was I?
He's teaching the dragon to fly.
So it flies off.
Right.
Dragon to fly.
Yeah.
I hate this bit.
I guess now we're going to get our training montage as they, she learns to fly and they
grow together and their relationship strengthens or she'll fly up in the air once and age by
a couple of years.
And now she's an adult and just lands and speaks, I'm going to say speaks in the voice
of Rachel Vice.
Speaks in the voice of Rachel Vice doing a Irish accent, occasionally sometimes and
at other times just talking like herself.
And for some reason roaring like a Star Wars tie fighter.
This was the moment where as a child, when I went to see the film, this was the moment
when I realized it was irredeemably shit.
When she flies up, ages 20 years, flies back down and they're just like, yeah, that's
done now.
By the way.
This is it now.
There's no growth and learning in this movie.
It's just, oh no.
This needs to happen.
So now it's happened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ergon is the same at the start as he is at the end.
He learns nothing throughout, but while we're on this, I despise that the dragon has a woman's
voice, not that it's a woman, that it has a voice at all and it speaks to him.
It's so weird.
That does happen in the book though.
They speak through their minds, so I guess they couldn't really avoid that.
But yeah, that wasn't my issue with it.
It was more just, as I was saying, there's no growth or learning or them bonding that
this story is meant to take place over months, or at least this part of the story.
And they're just, it's all just two days, he's got a dragon and now it's a grown up
dragon who is just aware of everything that's happened in the history of dragons, whereas
in the book.
Yes, fully formed.
Just, yeah.
In the book, she's a knobbed teenager like he is.
That's the whole point.
Yeah.
I think the whole, if we're going to give credit to the book, yeah, it's kind of, they're both
aging together and developing together and they kind of, they feed back across each other
and they've got a strange relationship because they're immature, but none of that happens
here.
You can't do a coming of age story in two days.
Yeah, no, it's just a flash of light and then, yeah, she's old now.
And yeah, like you said, the dragons in this universe, the premise is that the dragons
are supremely kind of powerful, intelligent, I mean, they can fly, they're strong, they've
got the magical and oh, also by the way, they are completely at the beck and call of a random
human that they're assigned to.
They are a slave to them and there's nothing they can do about it.
And if he dies, you die.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
But if she dies, you're fine.
So Ergon now goes to Brom's house.
He wants to know more about the dragon riders, but Brom pretty much just tells him to fuck
off.
But we see that Brom's in possession of a history book about the dragon riders and he's
got a glowing red lightsaber thing.
History book that was written three years ago.
Still on the bestseller list in this middle earth land.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's got his fancy book, he's got his fancy lightsaber.
So there's probably more to this character who did the opening voiceover than we first
thought.
This very well-spoken random villager.
Yeah.
He does the voiceover and then the next time we see him, he seems to be a bit of a drunk
on the street, but he did the voiceover.
We know he matters.
What's the point?
It's Jeremy Irons.
Yeah.
Okay, so while all this is happening, Durser has raised the black wraith-like creatures
to go to the home of Aragon and kill him.
They're very cool.
A lot like a better movie we've seen.
Yes, they're cool because they're basically ring rates.
Yeah.
I remember Durser being cooler.
He's not very entertaining in this movie, not that a lot is, but I saw it very one-dimensional,
but they're sick and they go now and hunt down the hand of Aragon and I do like the
scene with the butcher where he hides underneath the table and it jumps up.
Very cool, but also just exactly the same as the scene in the fellowship where they hide
underneath the tree branch.
Everything's a little bit like a couple of movies we've seen before.
It's almost like the story was written by a 14-year-old boy who liked Star Wars and
Lord of the Rings.
Yeah, pretty much.
This is the point where, at least in the movie, essentially from now on it's Fellowship of
the Ring with a kind of sprinkling of Star Wars.
Oh yeah.
So yeah.
That's all that is coming now.
Absolutely.
Aragon, Aragon, Aragon is heading home from proms.
Aragon.
When he hears those wraith creatures they're torturing the butcher for information and
the butcher just gives up Aragon straight away.
So he's heading home because that's where the Ringwraiths have set off to.
And Sefirah, Sefirah comes down, picks him up, flies away with him in order to dissuade
him from going back, she knows the wraiths will kill him, so he finally gets back but
too late.
Uncle Owen is dead, Stormtroopers have already left, he can't avenge him, and...
Yeah.
He's now mad at Sefirah, sends her away, and then prom shows up for some reason.
We don't know why he shows up, because he's shocked to find out that he's a dragon rider
in this very scene, so why were you here then?
Oh, that's why I'm here.
I just wanted to find someone else to tell that there used to be dragon riders, you know.
Jesus, what did I do as bloody monologue again?
I've been practising this.
Come out here, well look at the landscape, and I'll just monologue in your ear.
So I actually write these down, that's the worst bit, I write so.
So.
So.
So.
His uncle's dead, he's now wanted by the Empire, and so they flee, he flees with a local hermit.
They head into the woods, they set up camp, and then we just get a big exposition drop
by Brom, Jeremy Irons character, as.
All he's been doing the whole time.
Just to make sure everyone watching is caught back up, because a lot of shit has happened.
So we make sure that we know that Durser is a shade, a sorcerer possessed by demonic spirits.
The Wraiths are called the Razak, they have to join the Vardin in the mountains who are
the rebels, and Obi-Wan Kenobi is their only hope.
So it is, I mean it's just lifted straight.
All of the scenes with the enemies are just lifted out of Lord of the Rings, mad.
Yeah.
So they bring back Saphira, and then Brom gives us a bit more exposition.
Did you know there used to be dragons and dragon riders?
Well he hasn't done it for 10 minutes, he needs to do his more work again.
He needs to serve, you know, back in my day, it was far better.
Three years ago.
And so because they've successfully evaded the Razak, Durser now senses definitely not
a R'kai Urguls down to hunt Aragon, Brom and Saphira.
And more riding on horses, more riding on horses, there's a scene where we see a caravan
of people being murdered by Durser's Urguls, they're being murdered by the Urkai and Aragon
wants to fight them, and then Brom is mocking him and his fighting skills, saying I don't
think you're all there, but there's people being slaughtered 15 meters away, well all
this is happening.
Brom knows a side quest when he sees it.
Those people aren't going to listen to my story.
But he's like, oh if you want to go and help them, well why don't you show me how good
you are at fighting, and they piss us off to have a little fight.
Yeah, and then we just cut to a Tekken scene where they're studding a dry river bed, and
they do just have a fight, he doesn't teach him anything, he just slaps him with a stick
a few times and then.
And by the way, if we can, if we can generously call it a training scene, that is the first
and last bit of training that Aragon gets from being child on farm to leading an army.
Once again in the book at least, I'm pretty certain there is a bit of sword fighting
training goes on in the book, not just, well you better get good if you don't want to get
hit by a stick, anyway should we go fight the kicks?
Just like mate, you are shit, have I ever told you about the dragon?
And they do a bit of camping and they're heading for the swamp people of swamp town, I don't
know if this place has ever given a name, strange people who live on the river, Brom
sends Aragon to go get bread so Aragon goes to a fortune teller as you do.
I like this bit because the whole point of this is to keep low, to not be found so nobody
can know about them and the first thing Aragon does when he goes off his own on his own is
allow a fortune teller who tells him immediately, as soon as I do this, I will know everything
about you and he's like, yeah, sure, sign me up and then she knows everything about
him.
So she tells him that there is a woman and a death in his future.
She is worse than fortune tellers in our world, but well done, cheers, I'm going to
meet a woman at some point in my life, am I?
But she's gone now and never comes back, so Aragon gets his fortune, he gets no bread,
so she probably should have told him that hunger was in his future.
By the way, in the meantime, mildly important, when they're sat around a campfire, Brom
is whacking a couple of ordinary stones together over a pile of sticks and then gives up and
uses a little magic spell to set fire, to start a campfire, which Aragon overhears and
it doesn't really question it that much.
No.
What was that?
What was that?
Nothing, nothing, I've told you about the Dragon Roses.
Brushes them off, but that becomes important.
The man who, I was going to say, should be teaching him all this stuff, but to be fair,
in the book is teaching him all this stuff, isn't just going, no, my magic, mine, stay
away.
Yeah, exactly.
But yeah, there's no teaching and learning because Aragon, whilst he's been fanny around
getting his fortune told, the Iroquai have shown up and now they've got to escape the
swamp village and it looks like they may be defeated and then Aragon fires his magic
fire arrow because he sort of heard Brom mumble a spell once and then now he knows magic.
He heard him mumble the spell and he intuited, he figured out how to do every aspect of the
magic, but all he saw was Brom, you know, hunch over a campfire, say this word, bruising
gear, and then the fire started.
So presumably you're holding a bow and arrow, you're just going to set your bow on fire.
What do you hope would happen?
And then he faints, like a bitch.
Shit, some set of passes out.
This all sets up here that magic is supposed to have a cost, like he said earlier, Sam,
where there's a transference of some kind, but this is the last time that's important.
Everybody can use spells, however they like, from now on, without there being a cost.
Magic always has a cost unless you're the bad guy who can apparently just do whatever
the fuck he wants, just seems to be the way.
I nearly die if I make an arrow set on fire, but this guy just can't be on the head and
kill them and make a dragon make it.
A dragon?
Why not?
So yeah, they manage to escape.
Aragon has fainted, Saphira swoops down, picks him up, and they head off and then Brom
is explaining that magic is, it comes from dragons, it flows through you and through
all living things, and we've seen this movie before, right?
But you perform magic by knowing the Elvish words for things, so you can control anything
by knowing its Elvish name, so shit must just go off whenever the Elvish are having
a chat.
Yeah, you're right.
I'll be very careful how they talk, but so Brom tells him that he tells him that
yeah, the word is the thing, it's intrinsically linked, and you call power by saying that
word, so for example the word fire, that sets fire to shit.
Then Aragon's response to this is he kind of walks around and goes, what's that?
What's this?
What's tree?
What's stick?
What does that mean?
Sort of like the fifth element when she's alive for the first day ever.
Tree?
I've never seen tree before, and he is thrilled.
What's tree?
He's so happy, and he gets like five or six words, and those are the only magic words
that he uses for the rest of the film, so this again is the extent of his magic training.
Yeah, that's my repertoire.
Brom tells him, he tells him this is very complex, yeah, that's tree, that's branch,
this is very complex, don't use it, and then that's that.
Because he does use branch later, doesn't he?
Yeah, so it turns out while Aragon was out not buying bread, Brom had bought him a dragon
rider's saddle so that he can ride Saphira properly, and so they end up just, they're
up in the sky, whizzing in and around all the green screens, lots of motion blur, and
then the Razak are back, and they're going to, talking to my wife, I've written it right,
the Razak are back, and they attack Brom, that doesn't help.
Well we see here that Aragon can see through, like Keegan Ewe's dragon eyes, and they have
like a nice little zoom power, and they can also see like heat vision, because that's
how he spots the Razaks.
Dragons have also got X-ray and zoom.
Yeah, so they've got fucking heat vision, are they blind whilst they're doing fire?
Just wildly aiming it anyway.
That's a good question, but I'm sure there'll be no cost or consequences.
Did you know there used to be dragon riders?
That's what fucking Brom is trying to tell the Razak.
They used to be dragon riders, they all crashed, I don't know where they were going.
So the Razak show up, they attack, Aragon defends himself with the word for tree or branch,
and apparently that is enough for the tree to know to attack this, and hang, that's what
I was going to tell them, by the neck.
This Razak.
He shouts branch, and the tree is like, yeah go on there, whips this fork around the neck,
strings him up, and then the camera cuts just before Logan Paul shows up.
Brilliant.
So yeah, there they win, but Brom's now pissed at Evan, I do not want that line drawn between
me and him, I'm not the smartest guy in this podcast, what's tree?
Brom is now pissed at Aragon because he risks a fear of life in fighting the Razak.
And this is where we find out that Brom was a dragon rider, but his dragon's now dead,
it was killed by, so many names, Morgoth, fuck it, it was killed by some dude called
Morgoth, and so Brom killed him back, which killed Morgoth's dragon and now there are
no more dragons, and Brom hates himself.
And that was only the story.
Now he just has to go around telling everyone there were dragons, that's his punishment
for ending dragon riders, and makes sure no one forgets.
And now Durza is pissed off, his Uruk I have failed to capture Aragon, his Razak have failed
to capture Aragon, and so he force finger points the lead Uruk to death, and then congratulates
one of the other Uruk on their new promotion, you know, like Star Wars.
And then he uses this, a magic, he uses some strange dark magic to trick Aragon into coming
to him by sending a message through his prisoner, Arya.
Someone who he also doesn't know by the way.
Yeah, yeah, true, what was the point of that?
Oh, she's attractive.
Random bitch who shows up in his dreams.
Oh yeah, that fortune teller did say there'd be a woman.
In the message, she says that you're the only one who can help me, you know, like in Star
Wars.
I love how Durza will literally do anything but do this job himself, the king asked him
to hunt down Aragon and so forth, he sent two different people, yeah, and he can teleport.
This would be a two minute job for him.
You know where he is, you can teleport, there's seven dragons and shit, and by the way, you
can't die.
But if I go there, the old man's going to start telling me about the dragonrider, I
can't do it.
He's like the bloody Mormons knocking at your door.
Do you have five minutes to talk about our Lord and Saviour dragonriders?
So Aragon wants to go and rescue Arya, Brom says he shouldn't but Aragon goes anyway,
sneaks into Gilead whilst being followed by a man who's randomly dressed as one of the
elves from Helmsdeep.
I don't think I caught that it was called Gilead, but they made sure to put an apostrophe
in so it's a completely different name, Gilead.
Is that from something other than the Gunslinger or Dytower, I don't know if that's a reference
to something else.
That's where I know it from.
It's definitely not only from this, I know that.
Nothing in this movie is.
Absolutely not.
He rushes into Arya's cell, I'm Aragon Skywalker, I'm here to rescue you, but it turns out it
was a trap, as they're waiting, and he's surprised by how unimpressive Aragon is, we get this
a few times.
You're very unimpressive aren't you, perhaps he thought it was a little too short to be
a stormtrooper.
Nice.
Very good.
You know, like in Star Wars.
Aragon, I mean, putting aside the fact that he single-handedly stormed this castle, snuck
in on his own, with zero training, he is still for all intents and purposes.
I don't agree with that.
He had that fight.
He lost that fight, that's enough.
He had that fight where he tripped and stood in the stream.
He gets in, he uses his dragon's heat vision to see through the walls, and he sees Arya
in her room writhing and moaning.
Oh, she is, frigging herself senseless as far as I can tell.
She's just lying down, right?
I mean, yeah, what I wrote down is he walks around, he sees her rubbing one out, and he
decides to head in.
Oh, I'm pretty certain.
And she's just lying there.
I'm pretty certain that's what was happening on that bit of video, yeah.
It's very strange.
She's not being tortured or anything, she's just...
Just spending her time.
Yeah, you've got to pass the time somehow, haven't you?
Well, exactly, that's what I'm saying, yeah.
When you're in prison, what else are you going to do?
With no guards around, she's got a privacy.
She thought, making dragon eyes through the wall.
So big magic, that's a big magic fight, they throw things at each other with magic, a bit
like the second Star Wars movie, actually, no, I think about it, but never mind.
The bad guy throws a couple of spears at Eragon, and his response is to shout the word for
fire again.
Well, there were no trees.
The last time you did that, she exploded.
And you fainted.
And you fainted.
And that was like 10 minutes ago.
That was a good idea, yeah.
So yeah, it looks like Eragon's going to lose, he's weakening by setting everything on fire.
And then, despite the fact that when he and Sephirah decided to set off to go and rescue,
or they flew away, seemingly many miles, Brom's here now, even though they left him behind,
just in time to step in front of a flying spear.
And Brom's been caught.
Oh no, what will we do with that Brom?
He's taught me so much.
Like how the dragon rises.
It was the world like five years ago.
Brom's been speared, and then Eragon shoots Dozer in the forehead with an arrow, and then
he teleports away.
Yeah, why?
Why teleport away?
He's fine.
The only point of this is so we think he's dead.
But he was smiling when he left.
He could have just won.
Yeah.
He's like, ha, got ya.
And now because we've lost a character, one's dying and the enemy's gone off, now the movie
randomly chucks in the son of Morgoth.
So yeah, Sephirah is out of nowhere, crashed through the roof, and we hear that tie fighter
again, but we don't see it.
And then Eragon, Arya and Brom flee, and yeah, turns out this mystery guy's on their side,
but we don't really know who he is yet.
But weirdly, as they're fleeing Gilead, Eragon's saying to Sephirah, you need to fly higher,
there are archers on the roof, and she's saying, I can't do that while there are three
people on my back.
And then it just doesn't matter, they're just then on the ground, they've landed and they're
taking care of Brom.
It was completely irrelevant.
Yep, this movie loves to set up some sort of stake with a cost, and then just completely
ignore the cost.
Oh, that could have been bad.
But he wasn't.
So yeah, they're faced off with Derser in his big grey stronghold.
Eragon succeeded in rescuing the princess.
Obi-Brom Kenobi is now dead, and they're going to head to join the rebellion.
But before all that, before he dies, Brom tells Eragon that Derser is not dead, because
you shot him in the head and you can only kill him by piercing his heart.
And also, did you know there were dragon riders?
Yeah, so Eragon wants to muffle the sound of the dragon-roaded tail, so he buries him
under about two tons of stone.
And then, even though Sephirah, there's a whole point of contention here is that she
can't breathe fire yet, because even though she is fully grown, she just can't breathe
fire yet, because the plot doesn't need her to.
But what she apparently can do is like, who out some breath enough to turn all these rocks
into fucking diamonds?
Yeah.
That's like, surely that would have been more useful to us.
That's hotter than fire, I think.
That's really hot.
So yeah, Brom's in his big diamond casket, and Eragon, Arya, Sephirah are now going
to head for the Varden, when suddenly Arya is now definitely not been stabbed by a morgul
blade.
And now they've got to get her to the Varden quickly or she'll die, Eragon doesn't know
where it is, so he asks her to show him the way, and so she places a hand on his head,
and shows him the way to the Varden.
And then our mystery guy from earlier shows up.
It turns out he is Mirtag, and they need him, because only he knows the way to the Varden.
I didn't even notice that.
No, I just skipped over that.
At this point in the film, I was just accepting what was happening.
Yeah, there's been too much, and you just let it roll over you.
Never.
I'll pick up on everything, and so yeah, there's now more horse riding as they head into the
mountains, and so they arrive at the correct location they're being pursued by Urukai,
and just like every good gamer ever, they know you've got to check behind the waterfalls.
So that's what they do in the water, and it turns out the Varden's secret encampment
hidden behind a tiny waterfall, and they meet the Varden leader Ajahed, and I'm sure he'll
matter a lot to the rest of this plot.
Absolutely.
We see like of the Varden, this legendary resistance group, we see like seven or eight
guys stood around here.
Is it a resistance if you've just fucked off?
No.
You're just in hiding, it's what you're resisting.
The king's not trying to kill you anymore, what are you resisting, you're just a village
somewhere.
Well, that's what they basically are, but we don't even get to see that, this is something
that's been built up for admittedly a short film, but it's been built up as this group
of rebels, and we see them from afar, they've got a bit of a village setup, but that's the
extent of it.
They're just, it's just way too few guys.
I mean, you say, they don't even do anything.
You say that, but so far what we've seen of this super powerful king's army is a bunch
of filthy fat bastards in regs who can't shave properly, just like absolutely stinking and
useless, most of them have got like in sticks and clubs.
Stakes are low.
And then we get to the Varden, and they're all dressed purely in gold.
All their armor is gold, he goes into the village and all the market, they're all just
trading jewels and gold.
This does not seem like the lowly resistance versus the powerful kingdom.
They're minted, no wonder they're not really resisting.
What we're seeing here is like, what is it, the Cayman Islands?
This is the tax haven, the hideaway from the king and his taxes, that's why we think he's
evil.
Durser and his, every time I say that, you're going to have to get over it, we're nearly
done.
Durser has been sent by Galvatorex, who's now very pissed off, to go and defeat the Varden.
And he arrives with his big green screen army, it is bad, but yeah, he stands over it, stands
over them.
Durser has transformed, he's a different dude now, he's transformed from one tongue
to Palpatine.
But he's shouting to them how they now need to annihilate the resistance.
But then very, very quietly, almost to himself says, but the boy is mine.
They must be down there going, what, what was that last bit?
So it's kill everyone, yeah, yeah, but the boy, not the boy.
It's because he doesn't want to do it himself, he's gone out of his way to get other people
to do his jobs.
All that is, is Philip ticking the box so he can tell the king when he told them he was
going to kill the boy.
So yeah, the mix of the king's army and the stinking fat urgals are outside.
And so the Varden prepare, and they're all in their shiny gold armour, they've made
Eragon some very sick gold armour, Sofia has now got very sick our dragon armour, which
isn't gold, which is a bit rude, and they just, they look far better than the people
that apparently are oppressing them.
This is a, I mean, it's a minor point, it's a pedantic point, but when they're talking
about how the, the Smiths stayed up all night to make some dragon armour, they show a helmet
which is completely different from the one that she wears, so why are you making multiple
sets?
You didn't need to stay up all night, just do the one.
The Smith didn't talk to the CGI guy and now it's all a mess.
So yeah, now our battle starts and the scruffy band of Uruk-Ai smash through the walls,
but as far as I can tell they still just got sticks and clubs, but there's a massive explosion
as they burst through this wall, I don't know where their siege weaponry's gone, it must
be that tie fighter we keep hearing.
And Eragon and Sofia.
Why didn't the dragon turn the wall to diamond and just keep them out, it can do that, we've
just seen.
Yeah, true.
Oh, you're from the movie now.
Oh, the band guy at the end, yeah, I think he's from, thanks.
That's actually quite an accolade if I was the one to ruin this movie because it really
fucking tried hard to do that itself.
And so yeah, this is all the battle kicks off and then Eragon and Sofia go to join the
battle and I think we have the worst line in the entire movie which is saying something,
which is Eragon to Sofia saying, into the sky to win or die.
It's like a Jumanji rhyme.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, it's not good.
I had to take one of my 30 minute breaks again after that one before starting up.
That's enough.
Yeah, there's a couple like that at the end here.
Is that in the book?
That can't be in the book.
It can't be in the book.
It's just, it's so low effort.
Things seem to be going well for the Vod and they're defeating the fat, greasy cavemen
with their clubs because they've got metal armor and swords.
They really need to do much really.
But then they don't need to do that much in the battle because it was kind of reminiscent
of the last series of Game of Thrones where Daenerys rides in and just defeats an entire
army with her dragon because Sofia flies down and just fucking annihilates the entire like
battalion with a single breath.
As the king's actual army shows up and Derser seems very proud of himself and then seems
to have forgotten they're not fireproof and they all just get instantly annihilated as
they all march down in a line.
So now Derser is pissed and after a very long time decides, you know what, I should probably
just give this one a go.
Everyone else has failed and to be fair, he did ask me.
And so he dark magics together from the fire and smoke, from Sofia killing all those people.
A big black smokey, I've called it Puff the Magic Dragon, which I think is fair, big black
dragon smoke.
And so yeah, he is now on the back of that, Aragorn's on the back of Sofia and they're
having a fight in the sky and Sofia gets severely injured.
I mean, we don't have to go into huge detail, do we?
No, no, the film doesn't.
Aragorn manages to stab Derser in the heart, Derser dies, Puff the Magic Dragon disappears
and then Aragorn and Sofia crash into the ground.
Aragorn tries to heal her but he thinks he's too late and then he falls unconscious again
because that's what he likes to do.
And it's all just kind of post battle, wrap up stuff there.
The only intro.
A bit of bullshit now, isn't it?
A bit of bullshit.
Aragorn wakes up, Mirtag makes him think his dragon died for a second just for a laugh.
Yeah, just randomly and then it's mainly just they start setting up the second movie.
Yeah, can't wait for that.
Yeah, it'll be good.
The final scene is back to John Malkovich who's angry justifiably and he spins around,
he slashes apart a big map he's got behind him and it turns out he was hiding his dragon
behind there.
So that is now two of the main antagonists who had dragons at their disposal for the
entire film and decided instead to send little dumpy guys with sticks to kill another dragon.
Surely you've got to blame yourself.
Yeah, when you're sending guys whose weapons are made of wood to fight a creature that
breathes fire, it's your fault really.
You've both got dragons.
Yeah, so yeah, that was the movie, The End.
Well, we specifically don't have bad reviews this week because everybody hates this movie
quite rightly and they're not funny so much so as they are just people berating this and
you can see why.
And the only bit of trivia is something that I've already shared with you boys but for
the benefit of the pod, just a little note that the budget of this film was higher, seven
million US dollars higher than the Fellowship of the Ring.
Insane.
Insane.
Just leave it at that.
I mean, it's not even close in terms of quality, the dragon looks good but actually let's save
this for now and let's bloody do a question, Charmy Cox, I'd like to hear you defend yourself.
Come on.
So you think that was good, did you?
I don't know what that was.
I mean, to be honest, I think I forgot the name of this podcast when I picked it because
I just wanted to review that shit movie I didn't like 16, 17 years ago.
Mainly because I remembered the books being good and how heartbreaking this movie was.
I mean, I would never go back to the books either, I'm pretty certain if I went back
I would realise they're good because I liked Star Wars and I just got to read Star Wars
again.
Again.
But yeah, no, terrible film and I'm glad I subjected you to it and I didn't know you'd
never read the books, I just assumed you would have done.
Yeah, I have nothing to compare it to so I was hoping that, I had seen this before though,
this movie and I don't remember thinking it was that bad, I think it was just something
that came out and I ingested and that was it.
One thing I will say is, it's bad, but I don't think it's, even though it's 17 years old,
I don't think it's any worse than some of the stuff that comes out now, like Wheel of
Time on Amazon or Willow on Disney Plus.
Lord of the Rings, Rings of Power.
I think that, so I mean, my issue with this mainly is that it is so unremarkable.
Yes.
It's not bad, it's just incredibly safe.
Probably not good for a podcast where you need to remark on a movie, is it unremarkable?
It's terrible.
Yeah, no, awful choice for a podcast where we're meant to remark on it.
The, obviously, like we said, it's just Lord of the Rings with like hints of Star Wars,
this proves that if you plagiarise enough things, you can't get got for any individual
plagiarism because you've taken it from different sources.
I think it's proof that if you wait long enough, Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's dead, Star Wars,
then George isn't going to care, he's a billionaire, he's not going out there suing 15 year old
boys.
I mean, yeah, and that's the other thing that the criticism, the reason that we both hated
this when it came out, when we both went to see it when it came out, not together individually,
is because it was so, it was not faithful to the book, but I don't think that the fault
of the film is that it wasn't faithful to the book.
I think the book only found fame because it was a very generic, accessible fantasy book
at a time when that was just kind of opportunistically, you know, at its peak.
This is our word.
People discovering shit like this.
Yeah, this book was Our Generation's Twilight.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And if, you know, if they'd made the film more true to the book, Jesus Christ, it would
have been boring.
It would have been six hours long, and it would have been similar to this, except with
a lot more walking and a lot more stick fighting.
There's already so much of that.
So you're saying that it'd be a terrible idea if they made a Disney plus series on it, Sam.
Oh, well, thank God nobody would ever do that.
I will not be watching that.
Coming 2023.
Yeah, I agree with your sentiment, Sam.
It wasn't necessarily bad.
It was just egregiously boring.
It's when you just plowed through and then that was it.
I'm not going to remember any of the film tomorrow.
And that's all really I have to say.
I will never watch it again.
I don't recommend other people watch it.
That is it.
I'm just going to leave it there.
Yeah.
There's just nothing of note.
You can't say any more than that about it because it leaves you nothing to note.
This is the most nothing film.
Not just the most nothing film we've covered, but possibly the most nothing film I've seen
for ever a decade.
It's the most nothing film I've seen since I saw this film when it came out.
Did you know there used to be Dragon Raiders?
I did enjoy his performance.
I must say Jeremy Irons played Bronn very well.
He was wasted.
I enjoyed that.
Yes.
I thought he meant he was drunk.
No.
He was wasted the whole time.
I wouldn't blame him at all.
No.
No.
Well, is that everything, boys?
It's everything.
Yeah.
Sure.
Why not?
Well, thank you so much for listening and thank you, boys, for joining me.
Please leave us a five-star review and follow us over at So You Think Pod on Twitter.
When it's again next week, when we'll have watched Kangaroo Jack.
I can't remember what year it is right now, but I'm hoping it is.
Just has some more content than this movie did.
Until then, cold sorry.
Did you know there used to be Kangaroo Riders in Australia?