Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

In my opinion, the movie is not horrible, nor is it completely off from the books. It is a good movie that ou can really get into, even if you only started watching it in the middle.I, and many others, would have been much, much happier if they had stayed true to the books, but in some cases, i like the movie's changes.since saying which are good and which were bad is a spoiler, i will not say, but there are moments that you'll find yourself going back to the books and wondering which you like better, thought of course, the book will always be Best. :)

Is it a rule that TV adaptations of classic fantasy/sci-fi novels have to be boring or reworked as to be virtually unrecognizable? Both are true in the case of this Canadian-lensed version of an Ursula K. LeGuin novel. The acting is wooden, the plot reworked beyond repair, and the whole thing simply lifeless. It involves a young wizard in training (Shawn Ashmore with a 1950s perm) who is destined to be the greatest wizard of all. Danny Glover has a small role as the kid's first mentor. The head of the wizard school looks way too much like Dumbledore, which is to say they both resemble Merlin, which I suppose cannot be helped when dealing with magicians and wizards. I seem to recall a British or PBS adaptation of another LeGuin novel, LATHE OF HEAVEN, many years ago. There actually were two TV adaptations of that groundbreaking novel, I think. Maybe you should check one of those out instead of wasting your time with this. Better yet, read some LeGuin. She was a writer of modernist sci-fi and fantasy, and sad to say is largely forgotten today. Ditto Philip Farmer, whose RIVERWORLD saga was made an equal mess of on TV.

In its own right, the series isn't that bad. Not great, but watchable. The problem I have with it is the way they took some brilliant books, removed everything that was fantastic about them, threw it away and created a mediocre fantasy series. That's what really hurts. For a start, LeGuin has stated she made a point of making all the characters, bar a few, black. A nice touch. In this, all the characters, bar a few, are white. Draw your own conclusions. My favourite book of the series was the Tombs of Atuan. I loved the image of a girl priestess worshipping a nameless evil alone in the dark. So the idiots take that excellent image and tear it apart. The girl is now a hawt young woman with "love interest" written all over her, and she isn't serving the nameless ones. God forbid, that would be far too dark. No, she's trying to keep them bound. Pfft. And Jasper. Poor Jasper. In the original books he was just a student that the arrogant Ged didn't really get along with. He wasn't particularly nice, but then neither was Ged. In this he was Draco Malfoy with an attitude problem. There's so much more I could add, but it just isn't worth it. Don't waste your time on it.

Having just watched this harmless, derivative, typically mediocre production, I was curious how others received it. After reading a few of the comments here, I'm adding mine.First, I have never read an Earthsea book. Therefore, all I perceived was a rather middle-level "typical" fantasy story. I got a kick out of what I thought was a cheesy ripoff of Harry Potter at the wizard's school, it was so clearly a copy that it would have been laughable at any time.The acting and production values were, simply, typical Hallmark. Not great, not awful, just bread-on-the-table pulp of the sort that keeps people employed.If you look at the entire Fantasy/Science Fiction film industry, there are rarely any that are actually better, and many that are a LOT worse (notably better: Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, notably worse: 2001's Planet of the Apes) Now that I've said that, if I had been an Earthsea fan, I probably would have been just as furious and felt just as betrayed as anyone commenting here. Clearly, only fans of a book or series should be involved in producing movie versions.