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The Seeker: The Dark is Rising
Directed by David L. Cunningham
Written by John Hodge
Starring Alexander Ludwig, Ian McShane and Frances Conroy
Canadian actor Alexander Ludwig is the chosen one who must fight 'the Dark.' (Fox Searchlight)
Classification: PG
Rating: **
In the gaps between Harry Potter books and movies, there appear to be plenty of other adolescent heroes prophetically chosen to battle evil. This summer, there was Skinwalkers, with a 13-year-old chosen to fight an ancient tribe of vampires. Now there's The Seeker: the Dark Is Rising, with 13-year-old protagonist Will Stanton, an American kid who has moved to an English village with his teacher father (John Benjamin Hickey), mom (Wendy Crewson) and large crew of siblings.
At its warmest and most engaging in the early domestic scenes, The Seeker establishes Will (Canadian actor Alexander Ludwig) as the put-upon youngest son who's forced to sleep in the attic when his older brother comes home from college. On the school bus, Will has a crush on a pretty girl, Maggie (Amelia Warner), but he's too shy to talk with her. Because his birthday falls close to Christmas, it is usually ignored, except by his little sister, Gwen (Emma Lockhart).
This year though, something is up. The local rustics who bring the Christmas tree have a special interest in him; the family dogs bark and crows seem to congregate wherever Will goes. When he heads to the mall to buy his sister a present, he's seized by a pair of security guards who accuse him of shoplifting. Once they get him into a private office, they demand that he reveal "the sign" — and then crows start flying out of their mouths and they attempt to attack him. Will escapes and returns home. Clearly, this is more than the usual hormonal issues.
The Seeker doesn't sustain the mystery for long. In a perfunctory fashion, Will is introduced to the remnants of a tribe of warriors called "the Old Ones," led by Merriman (Ian McShane) and Frances Conroy, who start spooling out the exposition. They have been travelling through time and fighting "the Dark" for the past millennium and now things are coming to a head. Will is, they explain, the chosen one, who has the secret to "the light" stored in six signs, or tokens, and a showdown is coming. He has to retrieve these six tokens from various eras before he can wage the ultimate battle against the Dark Rider (Christopher Eccleston, offering the only piquant performance here), a Satanic figure who doubles as the ingratiating village doctor.
Along the way, Will learns that he has yet another brother, which his Mom neglected to mention, who was abducted as a baby. The missing child explains Dad's downbeat disposition.
The script for The Seeker was adapted by John Hodge ( Trainspotting) from the second novel of Susan Cooper's five-volume fantasy series. Although Cooper's books were written in the seventies before computer games, the plot here feels like a video-game walk-through. At unexpected moments, Will is sent hurtling to a new time-frame, where he has to find the next token, whether it's hidden in a glass roof or a skeleton's mouth. The set-up quickly becomes repetitive. Anyone who has sat through a long, public-school Christmas concert may recognize that familiar sinking feeling: Do we have to sit through all six tokens?
As Will's domestic story recedes, the movie becomes an exercise in computer-generated overkill, with animated images of swirling snow and soot. There's one silly phallic interlude where Will shows Maggie how he can make a kitchen knife dance between salt and pepper shakers, but otherwise The Seeker is as lugubrious as its title suggests.
Whether you fully embrace the Harry Potter phenomenon or simply live with it, there's no question that J. K. Rowling is an imaginative story-spinner. The trouble is that she has ruined the field for the legions of the second-rate.
