- Running time:
- 99 minutes
- Rated:
- PG
- Cast:
- Ian McShane -
- Merriman Lyon
- Alexander Ludwig -
- Will Staunton
- Christopher Eccleston -
- The Rider
- Frances Conroy -
- Miss Greythorne
- Amelia Warner -
- Maggie Barnes
(3 ratings)
2 1/2 stars (out of four)
Teenager Will Stanton may be every parent’s dream: He’s got an interest in physics and he’s the key to saving the world.
In “The Seeker: The Dark is Rising,” Will (played convincingly by young actor Alexander Ludwig) is seemingly your run-of-the-mill school kid: He gets razzed by his older brothers, tongue-tied by a beautiful girl and booted from his room when his college-age brother comes home to crash for the holidays.
But there’s more than meets the eye to this socially awkward 14-year-old kid. He’s actually got the eye, and if he doesn’t use it—and quickly—the world as we know it will come to an end.
Harry Potter, meet your not-so-much cousin.
At its best, “The Seeker” is a pretty vivid fantasy book come-to-life; it does a decent, passable job of adding to the canon of kid-lit flicks.
It’s not too violent, yet it’s just exciting enough—great water sequences, fire and exploding cars—to be cool to a young audience. “The Seeker” is a film adaptation of the second book in the series “The Dark is Rising,” by British (though she’s tooling around in Connecticut these days) author Susan Cooper, which tells of an ancient group of warriors who are battling against dark forces. The Newbery Award-winning fantasy takes place in and around England and Wales and weaves British mythology with original, creative approaches (including the amusing tension between this American teen and the “old ones,” who include “Deadwood’s” Ian McShane). In a change from the books, Stanton and his family are from the States, and his father is a physics professor whose studies center on the balance between light and dark. How fitting. The fate of the world revolves around the same subject, with his son as the guide to the light.
Had it not been for the Potter series, the bar for children’s fantasy film wouldn’t be quite as high, and “The Seeker” falls short of the high-riding, high-quality material delivered in the Harry Potter film series.
Still, there’s good stuff here; even though it deals with the outlandish and the mythical, the film delivers some very relatable material.
“You’re 14,” Stanton’s dad (John Benjamin Hickey) tells him when his son comes to him for advice about the weird things happening to him. “These changes are normal.”
Not in Will Stanton’s world, they aren’t.
SHOWTIME LISTINGS
Movie theaters and showtimes for The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising in Chicago.
