Pun Salad

If I was forced to play a science fiction version of David Lodge's "Humiliation" game, I think my entry would be this: Even though I own decades-old paperbacks of Ursula K. Le Guin's acknowledged classics The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, they're unread.

Nevertheless, I had high hopes about seeing this: I loved other movies from the Japanese animation wizards Studio Ghibli, and Netflix predicted I'd like this too. But … eh. IMDB claims that Ms. Le Guin was also disappointed, so I'm in good company.

Briefly, things are falling apart in the fantasy land of Earthsea. Crops are failing, dragons sighted near land, fighting with each other. And the young peoples' music—it's just noise! What's going on?

Enter Prince Arren, who immediately fails to grab our sympathies: he stabs his dad. (If they explained why he did that, I missed it.) On the lam, he meets up with Sparrowhawk, a wise old wizard who's trying to diagnose the ills besetting Earthsea. They run into all sorts of problems, but eventually figure out that it's a plot set in motion by evil and creepy wizard Cob.

Good news: this movie is beautiful to watch. Bad news: I was unable to make a lot of sense of it. In fact, I kept nodding off, and eventually gave up backing up the DVD to figure out what I missed. There was a climactic battle, and it was sort of cool.

True: I kept trying to figure out who was doing the voice for Sparrowhawk. Could it be… Sean Connery? Sounds like him! Irony of ironies, when I looked it up, it turned out to be … Timothy Dalton.

"The name is Hawk. Sparrow Hawk."

Other voices include Willem Dafoe as the evil wizard, and—honest—Cheech Marin as a thug.