This time last year, before da Dominion was launched and I had oodles of free time to watch crap movies, I saw a trailer for the movie The Seeker: Dark Rising. I was not impressed enough to take a date to the theatre – where the lackluster flick could at least encourage a female companion to salvage the hundred minutes in a dark enclosure with foreplay – the worse the movie the farther I let them get, but your Dominus is not cheap! It wasn’t even notable enough for the pizza and beer movie mocking nights with the guys.

My issues were the apparent Mary Sue kid star with his Jedi powers, the fact that “seeker” just sounds like a synonym for protagonist (lazy writing, as you‘ll see), the ever niggling subtle racist phrasing of “dark rising” (which will be reaching a peak in real life on Tuesday) and the waste of Ian McShane – a favored actor from HBO’s masterpiece of writing Deadwood who now seems to me wasted if not knifing a cocksucker or engaging in personal monologue exposition while getting blown. But I didn’t see the flick, so enough prejudicial dumping.

I bring it up cause this forgotten fantasy seemingly has a successor in The Legend of the Seeker, which premiered in syndication this weekend to a TV audience of myself and every other gamemaster busy revamping the rules of their homebrew campaigns: 7 total globally. The movie with the magic boy and this period fantasy aren’t really even linked outside of the word “Seeker”. The film based off Susan Cooper’s child novel series and the show from Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth books, but both have the strong scenting of cheese. Justification for my distaste for such a hack pronoun on par with “the one”, “the chosen ”, “the savior”, “the maverick”, “the new hope”. It’s never “the mafucka with a sword and a lot of luck/balls”.

Sam Raimi, Michigan star – Spiderman director – and producer of both the Hercules and Xena series, created and exec produces this attempt at genre resurrection for TV. You must figure if anyone can pull off this new story it’s gotta be him … or it could go Spidey 3.

New Zealand landscapes, check. I guess if your only other export is a fruit that resembles gorilla gonads you better get all the fantasy you can shot in your verdantly beautiful backyard. Zeals, check. These are the not quite Black, not quite Asian Polynesiany minority stand ins popular in these multicultural times when you don’t want to go with the traditional other white people of dwarves and elves.

Damsel in distress, check. Kahlan the Confessor has the added quirk of being able to force the Truth from people magically – and any other power that would be convenient to the plot – so she must be killed by the evil tyrant Darken Rahl – evil warlord, check. Handsome farmer boy with a greater destiny, check. Richard is the guy destined to take out the big bad evil guy (BBEG), and was foretold to be “the Seeker” (why not “the savior“ or “king killer“), was saved from infanticide by an old wizard, whom was sought for assistance by the distressed damsel and gives Richard the magic sword of Truth. Check, check, check ,check … and check.

Now the three: Richard, Kahlan, the wizard Zeddicus (his name being the most original thing in the story so far) and the Zeal strong guy Chase – long time friend of Richard and the Chewbacca of this saga – though he was Captain Typho in the prequels) set out to stop Darken whom is marching the conquer the rightfully generically named Westlands.

Some pluses include a tone more gritty than Raimi’s older works. There’s a lot less chuckling and more worrying over the stakes. I appreciate this since you need a fair amount of dramatic tension to justify the comic relief. I kinda missed the lesbian themed bath scenes of Xena and Gabby, but there’s a hinted attraction of Richard to Kahlen with old Zeb serving as prude warden. The climax was directed in a very Pose Fu style – they slow down the choreography to show each parry and deflect then the killing strike is nearly paused for the visceral effect, 300 used this alot. Some see this a melodramtic, preferring the more realist Rapid Fu that characters like Jason Bourne fight with. They’re free to felate that style on their own blogs. May develop into something, but the first impression is mostly weak.

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