Edit: And our preoccupation with this journey goes back a few thousand years. We can twink it and fool with it all we want to. It is THE monomyth and we can't get away from it. As an example, my hero is invariably female. But when you go down to the bare bones it's still the hero's journey. Your journey might be over entire nations or within one city. The evil will vary. The monsters you face may be Grendel, orcs or just humans. But that doesn't change it and it is by no means limited to speculative fiction.

Ok--lecture over.

That's a bit like saying, "when I think of light bulbs, I don't think Edison."

I was thinking of Gandalf. Poetic license?

I agree my attitude towards epic fantasy is unreasonable. It's a question of taste. Or perhaps in my case, lack thereof.

Edit: Sorry about the atheist thing. It's all a plot, of course. We're putting something in the popcorn.

I have never read the book, so I didn't know what to expect when I saw the movie last night. I thought it was pretty bad. Sure, a lot of talented people were involved, namely the digital artists, the acting was usually pretty good, can't say the same for the score... But, the main problem was that the story kept blipping forward from random point to random point without taking any time to make me care about anything. There was always something going on, but it didn't ever connect very well to what was going on five minutes ago. A lot of characters were just dropped and forgotten, like the James Bond fellow. And the "surprise" darth vader twist "I'm your mother" could be spotted a thousand miles away. In fact, I managed to guess this "twist" the very first scene the golden lady was in.

I think there is potential for very interesting fiction, but the film version simply jumped around randomly and made the whole experience entirely incoherent. With a pretty random battle involving whole armies that appeared out of nowhere and meant nothing--to top things off, and then an extremely inconclusive ending to boot.

Not very impressed. It's a notch above Eragon, certainly. But well below Narnia, Harry Potter, and the Lord of the Rings.