I must admit that I was quite excited when I was wondering through the video shop to discover that they had made a live-action version of Terry Pratchett's original discworld novels (this movie covers the first two books, Colour of Magic and Light Fantastic). I believe that I have seen an animated version but I thought it was cool to see them actually turn the books into a telemovie. I guess it was going to happen sooner rather than later considering the popularity of the Discworld Novels, and after the popularity of Lord of the Rings, Hollywood has been attempting, on numerous occasions, to replicate the success.
Discworld, I will have to admit, is one of the more original novels that have appeared since the phenomenal success of Lord of the Rings, and I suspect that their success is not only due to Pratchett's writing style, but also because it is quite amusing. I tend to call Discworld the Hitchhikers Guide for fantasy worlds. The plot itself is not very original as it involves a quest and saving the world, but the world itself and the characters, once again while not strictly original, still stand apart from the typical fantasy novels.
It is the characters that I will be looking at here, beginning with Rincewind. Now Rincewind is a wizard that has pretty much failed wizardry. He is like one of those perpetual students that has never successfully completed a university course and has thus spent the rest of his life trying, and failing, to get out of university. The reason is because, as a dare, he opened a powerful spellbook (which contains the eight spells that hold Discworld together) and one of the spells leap from the book into his head, and ever since he has never been able to master magic (because the spell in his head simply does not give him enough space to learn any more spells. Further, Rincewind is not a hero, he is a coward, and spends his time trying to escape from danger only to find himself slap bang in the middle of it. He is not a man with a goal or a quest beyond simply surviving. In subsequent books (and not all of the Discworld novels are based around Rincewind) he is no different, but I digress.
Next we have Twoflower. He is a tourist who has traveled from the legendary continent of gold to visit Anhk Morpork simply to look around. This, like the rest of Discworld, is poking fun at aspects of our culture using Discworld as the vehicle of comment. One might think it strange that somebody would travel halfway across the world simply to look at something, but we have a whole industry devoted to this. However, personally, until you have done it, one really does not understand the nature of tourism. Granted people did not do thus until at least the 18th Century, and even then travel was slow and people never traveled far for any reason beyond business or war. With industrialisation, and the increase in the speed of travel, things changed, however, prior to that, if somebody where to travel half way around the world, they generally did not return.
One wonders if Twoflower is supposed to be Japanese or American. I always envisaged him as American, but I read somewhere that he was supposed to be Japanese, which is not surprising since back when the book was writing people all saw the Japanese as being perennial tourists. In fact it seemed at the time that Australia rode on the Japanese Tourist's back. Things have changed since Japan's time in the economic sun is over, but now we are seeing them replaced by Chinese tourists. Personally, I like traveling halfway around the world to look at stuff, but to me there is a lot more to looking at stuff than simply looking at it and saying 'gee, isn't that beautiful'.
There are a number of other characters as well, such as Cohen the Barbarian. No guesses as to who this is supposed to be, though it should be noted that he is actually very old. Despite his age, he is still a very, very effective fighter. Out of all of the characters I liked Cohen the best, simply because he is pretty much unique. Who has ever heard of the hero of a fantasy novel being a geriatric barbarian who does not know when it is time to retire. Finally there is the luggage. Normally suitcases are background props, but not in Terry Pratchett. The luggage is not a prop but a character in its own right, and a psychotic and uncontrollable one at that. He also has developed a strong attachment to Rincewind, much to the laters horror.
Look, I liked this film, I thought is was done quite well, and while there may be questions as to how faithful it is to the original books, I personally thought they could have done a lot worse. Rincewind's character was portrayed well, and while I was not what I had conjured in my head (I thought he was a lot younger) it did make a lot of sense. It is funny that watching films like this make me want to go back to reading these books again, though I must admit that I have a lot of other books on my shelf that have a higher priority than a re-read of a Terry Pratchett novel.
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