Skip to main content

Eragon - Telling a consistent story



If you want to convince your public that your world is real you have to be consistent. You can't just change the rules in the middle of the story. Let alone doing it multiple times after each other. Case in point? The movie Eragon.

Eragon is about a boy who finds a pretty stone. Not long after the "stone" breaks open a cute, tiny little dragon appears (very similar to the dragon eggs found in A Song of Ice and Fire). I have no problems with fantasy so I'll happily buy dragons, wizards and elves. What I won't buy however is that as soon as the tiny dragon flies ten metres up in the air it suddenly changes into a huge dragon. Seems like some very powerful dragon magic... and a convenient way to prevent us from having to wait twenty years until the dragon is fully grown and the boy no longer a cute movie star.

Sadly from there on it only gets worse and worse. At one moment the protagonist decides to go rescue the girl even though his mentor tells him it's a foolish thing to do. He mounts his dragon and flies off to the castle that's at the other side of the country. He rescues the girl and right when he's about to get his ass kicked his mentor storms in and saves him! Huh, how did he get there? Five minutes ago he was at the other side of the country riding a horse. Are dragons as slow as horses? Possibly but later in the movie we see the dragon thundering over horses at speeds which would make a jet pilot envious.

The mentor gets wounded while saving the boy and his wounds need to be healed by the rebels who are of course at the other side of the country where they started in the first place. No problem I'd think, jump with three on the dragon and off you go. But the dragon can't fly a long time with three people on his back! The obvious choice would be to tie the man with ropes to the dragon and let them fly at Mach 1 speed to the rebels. That would be too simple of course so they decide to ride all the way to there on a horse...

Once they're there the big battle against the evil king is right around the corner (where do the baddies suddenly all come from?). The rebels "work all night" to create a magnificent armour piece for the dragon which shields it from tip to toe. Wait a minute, the dragon can't wear three people but she can wear full plate armour and have a fully armoured rider on her back? Sigh, talk about consistency. Once the baddies do arrive the dragon can suddenly also breath fire from one minute to the next. And the battle itself? A dragon which flies high above the ground and is able to burn a hundred soldiers at once doesn't really offer a challenging fight. I rather felt pity for the poor fellows on the ground.

It's sad to see all these inconsistencies. Once you start seeing one you start seeing one after the other. So if you do write a story then please think it through. At least try to come up with an explanation why key characters sometimes move from one place to the other or why the dragon can suddenly fry and fly. I do hope that the book is better then the movie but I won't find out any time soon as the movie has made me loose all interest in the series.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

EvoLisa - Comparing two images: performance tuning

It looks like the program is rather slow. Using DotTrace , I took a look at where the bottleneck is. The method that calculates the 'fitnesse', how closely the created image resembles the original image, is where most of the time goes to. Can we improve that? So what happens in this function? We compare each pixel of both images to compare their ARGB values. The better they match, the better the result! How can be compare this? First, I tried using the naive approach: compare each pixel using a bitmaps GetPixel(x, y) . Do that however, and you'll quickly see how excruciatingly slow that is. Especially considering that even with an image of 333x333 you're already comparing a million pixels each time you compare two images! So, instead I tried using a 'FastBitmap'. It's a project I found which wraps the Bitmap and provides much faster Get and SetPixel performance. Using this instead, the performance went up by an order of magnitude! But we can still do be
Post a Comment
Read more

EvoLisa - My own version

It's an old idea by now, can we recreate the Mona Lisa with fifty polygons by using random changes? The idea and original implementation by Roger Johansson can be found here . So, how does it work? You start with an source image. Then you create an empty image. We keep on doing small changes to this image. In my case this is one of these changes: Recolor our polygon Change the position of one of the polygon points Add or remove a new point to our polygon Add or remove a new polygon Switch two polygons After each action, we take a look and check if the newly changed image looks more like the original image by comparing each pixel. If it is, we continue using this one. If it's not, we discard the changes. Looks like a fun project! So I built my own version from scratch eight years ago, reusing some of the same ideas. Here's my result using the Mona Lisa: Mona Lisa with 50 polygons: You can see that it's the Mona Lisa but the details around the eyes and mou
1 comment
Read more

You can leave your hat on

You always think that these things only happen to others. You may even think that they should have used better protection. And then one day you get this mail in your box from your guild leader: Hi there, I dont know if this email will arrive, but I will try anyway. I saw that your chars came online today. They are selling all your gear and equipment and they are not answering on guild chat. I think you are being hacked. Suddenly it's not someone else who has been hacked. It's you! So I quickly took a  look in my second mailbox account and yes: someone merged my account to a battle.net account. My account has been frozen for half a year so someone must have hacked it and have reactivated it. Next thing I did was checking my characters and my armory page looked like this: Kind of them to put on my Christmas hat, it's the season!. Everything that a vendor will accept is sold however. After seeing that picture I  really started to worry. They reactivated my accou
1 comment
Read more