"Earthsea"

With a strong cast, decent script, high quality production values (including score) and solid source material it feels like this should have been a great film.  It wasn't.  So many problems.  First, this was the second part of a two part mini-series, but SyFy just broadcast it like a standalone film.  So, it felt like I was being dumped into the middle of a story.  Which I was.  The biggest problem is a Hollywood one.  Much like the "Percy Jackson" tales the producers here thought they could just take a bunch of random events from the book series and squish them together.  There is a major problem with that.  Only action films tell stories through one big major event after another.  Most literary series, as this one was, have depth and subtlety.  You can't just watch a character do something you have to understand who that character is, what they are thinking and feeling, why they do what they do.  Characters can't just reference a past you have to be able to take the time to understand how that past came to be.  Building those relationships makes the story tangible and understandable.  This was, unfortunately, a hot mess.  Especially when mixed with a different world with different rules one must take a lot of time to help the audience understand the setting.  Boiling these brilliant novels down to the "big events" left me feeling like I was watching some bad clip show for two hours, veering from one moment to the next without meaning or purpose.  Skip it and read the books.