On the one hand, things feel as though they have been edited down to the bone so much in places that meaning is almost lost and yet, on the other, one feels the entire seventh son plotline should really have been ditched to make room for more action. This is barely scratching the surface of the story that is crammed into the film, which is a big part of the problem.
They also tell him the reason for his greatness – he is the seventh son of a seventh son, but a quick count reveals that he only knows about five of his brothers - leading to a rather unnecessary sub-plot about the sixth. Lady of the manor Miss Greythorne (Frances Conroy ditching her American tones for English vowels), gruff butler Merriman (Ian McShane) and groundsmen types Dawson (James Cosmo) and Old George (Jim Piddock) are all ‘old ones’, basically protectors of the light, who’ve been waiting for Will to come along and score a home run for the team. Helping him in his quest are the residents of twee central, the local manor house. On his 14th birthday he discovers, after a rather unfortunate brush with evil at a local shopping centre, that he is in fact “the seeker” – a chosen one whose duty is to find six signs that will stop evil in the form of Christopher Eccleston from taking over the world and banishing the light forever.
Will Stanton (Alexander Ludwig) is a teenage American who has been plucked from his homeland thanks to his professor dad’s job, which has seen he, mum and the rest of his siblings – four elder brothers (a fifth, as per the current American preoccupation with all things war, is serving in the Navy) and a little sister – move to what appears to be the most twee village in middle England. It also, rather alarmingly, given that we’re still in October, marks the first Christmas movie of the year. And although writer John Hodge’s screenplay ultimately suffers from trying to cram an entire novel’s worth of mythology into its 94 minutes he makes a brave fist of it. The Dark Is Rising (the words “The Seeker” were used in the US but have been dropped from the English release of the title – too close to Harry Potter’s Quidditch position, perhaps?) is based on the second book in Susan Cooper’s five-book series about the battle between the forces of darkness and light. This is why books such as The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe, The Phoenix And The Carpet and The Box Of Delights have all proved so successful as BBC TV series – where their component parts can be picked apart and explored carefully over a longer runtime. Children’s fantasy books are particularly difficult to adapt into films given that most usually require quite a bit of background information to set up their ‘mythology’ and involve several, detailed quests.
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