Earthsea (TV)

Every once in a while I’m reminded of SyFy’s notoriously bad TV adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, and I think, maybe I should watch it just once, like the Star Wars Holiday Special, to see not just how bad it is but how it’s bad. And then I remember I have better things to do, like washing the dishes or sorting my socks.

So this isn’t a review, because I still haven’t watched it after 20 years, so much as it’s a placeholder indicating why, despite having read and re-read the books so many times, I haven’t.

Early on, Phillipa Boyens was going to adapt it and they were going to do the original trilogy. That sounded promising!

By the time they announced casting, Boyens was no longer attached, and they were only going to adapt the first two books. And there were some oddities in casting, like making Sparrowhawk white (Shawn Ashmore). I wrote on my blog at the time that Danny Glover would be perfect for Ogion. And when I saw that Isabella Rosselini was playing Thar, she seemed a good choice as well. But my interest had dropped from enthusiasm to the line between cautiously optimistic and cynical.

When it aired on what was then the Sci-Fi Channel, it was clear that “adapted” was…an extremely loose description. In addition to whitewashing the entire population of the archipelago except for Ogion, they seemed to have cosmically missed the point, and the heart, of the stories, which are fundamentally about knowing yourself and seeking balance in the world.

Le Guin wrote a scathing article in which she described in meticulous detail why the people of Earthsea are mostly copper-red or black, with white people in the north and northeast, how it was a deliberate choice to set it apart from the genre conventions established by Northern European fantasy tradition. (Whoever captioned the photo as “a pale imitation of Le Guin’s protagonist,” I salute them.) She further described the miniseries’ story as a “generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on sex and violence.” and noted that she felt “very sorry for the actors. They all tried really hard.” Other reviews were similarly unimpressed.

So I never got around to watching it, not even when it was released on home video and I could borrow or rent it. There didn’t seem much point. Eventually I read the summary on Wikipedia, which sounds…well, like a generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on violence.

I’m currently about halfway through my latest re-read of the series. I paused after The Farthest Shore to read the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, and a bunch of current books. And while I sort of want to re-watch the Studio Ghibli Tales from Earthsea (also a mishmash, this time of books three and four – but an earnest one at least), every time I contemplate watching this, the idea just slides off of my brain and lands in the “Nah, why bother?” bucket.