Potter wannabe doesn't satisfy

By Dan Moore

Published Oct. 9, 2007

The storyline behind "The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising" is pretty clear. The studios see a thousand trembling Harry Potter addicts, tracks up and down their arms, and think: Jackpot. If the story within the movie were half as clear, this would be an excellent fix for the suffering millions in need of more angsty magical adolescents post-"Deathly Hallows," and as things stand, most of them will look for harder stuff.

"The Dark Is Rising," a mid-70s young adult novel of some note, was one of many options exercised in the wake of Pottermania, and its story forms the heavily altered bulk of "The Seeker"'s narrative. We meet Will Stanton, the 14-year-old seeker in question, completely unsure of what he is supposed to seek or why he is seeking them.

Is it explained? For best effect, read the remainder of this paragraph while holding your breath. He's told by Ian McShane and Frances Conroy, the scene-stealing eccentric keepers of something called The Light, that as the seventh son of a seventh son in the Stanton family, who are long-time helpers of the Old Ones who work in the employ of the light, it's his destiny to travel through time and take six signs before The Dark commander The Rider gets them and destroys the world.

It's a lot of jargon to digest, and the movie doesn't do a very good job of it; little is explained or reasoned out. In medias res is a good storytelling technique, but at some point you have to get out of it enough to tell the story. Instead, all of this exposition, when it's even considered necessary to exposit, is dumped on us in the jam-packed final two acts.

The screenplay spends too much time trying to illustrate Will's dull existence when there's so much fantasy to get through, but worst of all it's turned the Arthurian original into the worst of leering '70s contemporaries, something so bluntly allegorical as to make John Bunyan wince. "The Dark is his lack of youthful self-confidence and his struggle to find his place in the world," it yells at us, "Get it? Get it?"

If you can get past the uncertain story, there are the trappings of a much better movie. Director David Cunningham, whose previous major work was the miniseries "The Path to 9/11," doesn't hesitate to leave the camera on the action, which was made with a limited number of CG shots.

The live action effects help to emphasize the existence of these forces just behind the real, visible world. The adult actors do great work, imbuing this mediocre screenplay with a Potter-like charisma.

But when it comes down to it, this isn't the pure stuff Harry Potter fans are looking for. It lacks the charm, the sense of lurking erudition and most of all, the intelligence of the books and the movies; it patronizes where Potter continues to astonish and confuses where Potter explains. It might get them high for a while, but the screenplay just wasn't cut right.