Eragon

I'd been under the mistaken impression that the writer's strike in Hollywood had only been going on for a few weeks. However, after catching the movie Eragon on cable television, it's apparent there's not been a lot of writing going on over in Tinsel Town for quite some time.

On paper, Eragon sounds fantastic. Swords, sorcery, dragons and horses. All wonderful things. It's based off a self-published novel by young author Christopher Paolini , who lived every writer's dream by publishing his own book, promoting it through grit and determination across America and eventually getting that hard work rewarded by a publishing deal.

But instead of creating something truly wonderful with all these ingredients, Hollywood writer Peter Buchman turns it into tripe. Utterly predictable rubbish that borrows shamelessly from every hackneyed sword-and-sorcery plot since movies began.

There's the young orphan boy, the wise mentor, the evil king and his vicious army. Doting family gets slaughtered at the prerequisite point and wise mentor, played with dreary lack of enthusiasm by Jeremy Irons, follows suite twenty minutes later.

Cue ethnically-diverse rebellion movement, pretty princess and fiery conclusion and all you're left with is nothing that you haven't seen sixty times previous to this. Even the computer animated dragon has nothing on the Sean Connery fire-breather we saw in Dragonheart - and that's pretty pathetic considering that film hit our cinema screens eleven years ago.

All in all, an utterly underwhelming effort - and more's the pity. The modest box office haul (first-time director Stefan Fangmeier cheerfully claims Fox were "modestly happy with the worldwide box office takings") probably doomed the rest of Christopher Paolini's books to obscurity.

Although in some ways (given the fact that he's a disgusting five years younger than me) that's nothing I should complain about.