Up The Earthsea, Without A Paddle: Review of Earthsea miniseries on DVD
In the late Seventies and early Eighties in Bombay, India, (long before it became Mumbai, India), it was hard to get science fiction books.
The few bookstores we had barely more than newstands and they kept a strange amalgam of non-fiction and the perennial pulp bestsellers that were such a staple here: Carter Brown, Nick Carter, James Hadley Chase, Perry Mason, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, Sidney Sheldon, Arthur Hailey, and, if you were lucky, an Asimov, a Clarke, maybe even a Dune novel or two, or a Heinlein juvenile.
But hardcore SF fans like I knew where to look.
We’d troll the backrooms of stores, where some bookstores kept the miscellanous stuff that wasn’t popular enough to put out on display on the five and a half shelves space out front.
Or the store rooms of book distributors and wholesalers. Or the second-hand bookstores like Smoker’s Corner on P.M. Road where they sold ‘stripped’ paperbacks with the covers ripped off and remaindered hardcovers for ludicruously low prices.
Some of this detritus was softcore, or even hardcore porn, predictably. Which meant that you often had middle-aged balding men shuffling about nervously, dabbing at their sweat with enormous handkerchiefs. But once in a while, you struck lucky, and came across a cache of real gold.
This was where I first discovered the work of authors like Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin (I quickly learned the K. stood for Kroeber), John Brunner, Clifford D. Simak, Philip K. Dick, and a ton of other SF authors whose books didn’t sell as well as Asimov, Clarke, Herbert or Heinlein.
I fell in love with Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossesed, as well as her essay Science Fiction and Mrs Brown which talked about writing the kind of social SF I loved so much.
So when I began discovering the Earthsea books, one by one, out of order of sequence, I picked them up without thinking twice. And when I had the first three books collected, I began reading them.
I remember reading them thrice in a row, over and over again, the way my teenage kids read Harry Potter now. I was blown away. It was the best thing I’d read since The Lord of The Rings, and believe me, I’d read a lot of SF already, even though I was barely twenty then.
Over the years, the book retailing scene in Bombay changed. Today, of course, we have 11 branches of the Crossword chain alone in Mumbai, and about ten other decent bookstores. Each one has its own SF section, and, by one of those peculiar quirks of happenstance, there’s usually one whole shelf reserved for my own books.
:~)
But it’s still as hard as ever to get the really good stuff, perhaps because India’s now fallen in line with international copyright regulations, and we don’t get those stripped-cover paperbacks or remaindered hardcovers anymore.
So we get tons of the latest big-selling fantasy series, endless copies of endless volumes in endless series (I should complain? My own series is at 4 books already, with two more to go!), and lots of big name authors but not too many of the lesser known but terrific talents.
But the newest instalment of the Earthsea books, as and when one appears, is always on display. And I’ve got them all. Although the later ones are nowhere near as good as the first trilogy. But you could say that about almost any fantasy series, right?
But even the weakest entry in the series is better than the travesty of an adaptation by the SciFi Channel. It’s funny, really.
Because, for instance, there have been other assembly line miniseries based on fantasy or classical material that have been turned into mid-budget well-cast and moderately well mounted miniseries epics.
You can even forgive them the way tweak history or the original books. Hallmark did it with Merlin, and it turned out pretty damn well, thanks partly to the terrific casting of Sam Neill and Isabella Rosellini, among many other great actors. Hallmark did a good job with Cleopatra based on the excellent Margaret George novel.
And I really liked their Arabian Nights, and Jason And The Argonauts too. As you can see, we get Hallmark here in India; though we still don’t get the SciFi channel…yet. But to be honest, I really like a lot of the SciFi channel’s work as well. Just not this one.
Past successes at making similar genres of miniseries epics is why it’s so disappointing to see the mess they made of Earthsea.
The problem starts with the casting. It’s not that it’s bad really. It’s that it’s all a bit off, with even the always dependable Danny Glover seeming ill-fitted, and the marvelous Rosellini completely wasted.
The script is awful; completely botching up the original dramatic development of Le Guin’s books, adding extraneous elements that do absolutely nothing to enhance the story or the screenplay, and generally butchering what was a brilliant, dark, and subversive fantasy epic to begin with, turning it into a typical good guy-bad guy young-wizard-in-training versus Guy-who-wants-to-conquer-world tale.
If I’m not naming names here, it’s because I’d like to think that the same actors in different roles could still work pretty well. It’s just that they don’t work as an ensemble, or even individually, here at all.
The production is cheap, but not that cheap. You could live with the stagey CGI and even the halfway decent sets and production design if there was a really good cast and a gripping storyline. But with the other faults wearing you down, every minor blemish becomes a major eyesore.
I could go on, but what’s the point? I don’t want to wax eloquent about something that’s a noble effort sadly mismanaged. I’ve read on the web that Ursula Le Guin herself withdrew support for the miniseries and was sorely disappointed by the results. And that loyal fans of the books were outraged.
I’m not such a purist that I’m going to say, Don’t watch this, because it would be disloyal to the author. Much as I love Le Guin’s work, I’d still go on to say, okay, I guess if you haven’t read the books, you might want to watch this miniseries just to pass a lazy Sunday afternoon.
But then again, you might not even want to do that. Because even without the context of the books, it’s still pretty lame.
In the end, the whole just doesn’t hold together. With or without the books. That’s something you can judge for yourself by renting or buying this DVD.
Or you can do yourself a big favour, buy the books instead (start with the original trilogy–they’re short books, like all fantasy books published before the Nineties) and see for yourself why beanies like I trolled the dubious backrooms of booksellers in Bombay searching for stuff this good.
