The Seeker: The Dark Is RisingDirector: David L. Cunningham. Screenplay: John Hodge, based on a novel by Susan Cooper. Cinematography: Joel Ransom. Film editing: Geoffrey Rowland, Eric A. Sears. Production design: David Lee. Music: Christophe Beck. Producer: Marc E. Platt. With: Alexander Ludwig, Christopher Eccleston, Ian McShane, Frances Conroy, Wendy Crewson, Amelia Warner, Gregory Smith, James Cosmo, Jim Piddock, John Benjamin Hickey, Emma Lockhart, Drew Tyler Bell, Edmund Entin, Gary Entin, Jordan J. Dale. USA. 97 min. 2007.
By David Sterritt
The premise is a tad simplistic even for the movie’s young target audience: The good forces are Light, the bad forces are Dark, and 14-year-old Will, who thought he was an ordinary kid, learns that he’s obligated to zip around the space-time continuum to make sure the goblins of gloom don’t extinguish the human race. An awesome responsibility, you say? Will isn’t fazed for long. Why, his dad wrote a thesis on this very subject, and hey, there isn’t that much to do in England, where his American family has moved for reasons more plotty than commonsensical.
It’s the opposite of a secret that Susan Cooper was a very unhappy author when she realized what the filmmakers were doing to her youth-market novel, and they certainly have scrambled her franchise’s formula, from upping Will’s age to thumbtacking extra words (“The Seeker”) onto the title of her second installment, which is the basis for the picture. Civilian moviegoers won’t much care, though, and on its own terms the film is reasonably good fun, with a couple of amusing performances and a generally lively mood. I hasten to add that on its own terms the story doesn’t make a single bit of sense, especially at the end, which is uproariously absurd. Could this be the work of Dark, powerful enough to resist the brightness of a projector lamp? Hmmmm……….
