The Seeker

What’s the Story?

Reviewed by carriew

Will (Alexander Ludwig) is an average kid celebrating his 14th birthday as Christmas vacation starts. On his birthday, he notices some strange changes: Dogs growl at him, blackbirds gather in his presence, and TVs are all static when he's around. When Will's family attends a holiday party at Miss Greythorne's mansion, finally some of the strange goings-on start to make sense. Miss Greythorne (Frances Conroy), her "butler" Merriman (Ian McShane), and a few other locals are Old Ones -- time travelers/warriors who serve the Light and banish the Dark. Will learns he's an Old One, too and has a job to do: Find six signs before the forces of the dark take over the world. The signs are hidden in some ingenious places and spaces in time, and it's a nice vacation from the rest of the movie to travel there, because back in the present you're bogged down by Will's troubled love life and a family secret about his father.

Is It Any Good?

Kids pining for a new Harry Potter-style fantasy film epic will have to keep the vigil going. Will Stanton, seventh son of a seventh son, seeker of the signs that will save all from darkness, makes a fine hero in Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising book series, but the movie adaptation is lousy. Even though a few CGI moments are great fantasy fun, the story is so muddled -- and so unnecessarily altered from the source material -- that it may make you side with the dark forces just this once. Will's growing relationship with the Old Ones and his realization that he's special and has a calling just isn't developed well. The movie's ending is strange and implausible, even for fantasy, and brings up all sorts of questions that future books in Cooper's series won't answer -- because they were not in the book to begin with.