Legends of Earthsea: Bite Me

Weak.

The 2004 Sci-Fi Channel story bore little resemblance to the Easrthsea trilogy I read as a kid, but I knew that would be the case, based on the author's own statements of disappointment.

I thought it was funny how they had girls at the wizards' school in the TV show, but no black people. In the book, the reverse is true -- it's a school where black and brown men train black and brown boys. Girls are barred (why a woman would've written something like that in the late 60's, I don't know). I guess Sci-Fi channel thought that an all male school would look like a seminary or a military school and that would be distasteful? By not sticking to the book, they made Roke Island seem like a rip-off of Harry Potter's Hogwarts in the eyes of anyone who doesn't know that Earthsea was written thirty years before Potter.

I didn't know what was going on with the side plot about the king that's trying to wake "The Nameless Ones." That's all made up. The priestess living out in the desert does show up in the second book of the trilogy, but the dynamic is different, since Ged is trying to steal from her people. And there's no romance.

Ged's wizard friend Vetch comes off too much like Sam Gamgee, but that probably couldn't be helped. In the book he's a fat friendly sidekick and he's a fat friendly sidekick in the TV movie too.

The locations looked good, at least the outdoors ones. Danny Glover was fine as Ogion, Ged's teacher. Isabella Rossellini is always going to be dignified.

Ultimately, I have to blame Ursula LeGuin for what we ended up with. With the exception of the 2003 Battlestar Galactica miniseries, Sci-Fi channel's made for TV movies are average at best and usually plagiarize from whatever's hot or an old standby (how many variations of Jaws and Aliens can they make?). It was up to the author to choose a better way to get her novels to the screen. If only she had held out a little longer.