I am a huge fan of the Earthsea books and have been since the 1970s. I was so excited to hear the books were being adapted into a mini-series, particularly now with the CGI possibilities out there. To say this was a huge disappointment is the understatement of my year. Unlike some, my dismay is not because they changed the story from the books - screen adaptations do that all the time, sometimes to an extreme degree like here. But for that kind of adaptation to be good, you still need good casting, good writing, good acting, and good direction. There was none of that here.
Even my husband, who is not a fan of the books, didn't want to keep watching it (we tuned out after about 45 minutes and then looked in twice more for about two minutes each), purely because the script was so wooden (oh, for the lyricism of Le Guin's original prose!) and the line reading by the actors was so poor - it was like watching a high school play without a breakout star. They took what was a subtle, UNIQUE (the operative word to the max) series of books and made it grotesquely derivative - heartbreaking, given how truly original Le Guin's world was. She had no Sauron or Voldemort equivalent in her books (think about it, you fans of the books) - her whole point was there is only the evil that men do. In her Earthsea, no one is completely evil but everyone is capable of evil acts (even Ged). But obviously Hollywood can only deal with external, black and white conflicts - and so it had to invent a big bad villain (with only a glancing association with an original Le Guin character). I started out very nervous about this, because Ged was cast with blond curly hair - but I couldn't have possibly imagined how profoundly awful it would be.
Please, everyone who is reading and writing these comments - don't blame Le Guin. This mini-series has virtually NOTHING to do with her books.
