What makes it different from others?

Some things I liked some I did not.

Sadly Over-hyped

An absolute waste of money

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.

One thing I don't understand. Pratchett wrote quite a lot of Discworld novels, and some of them are simply begging to be put on the big screen. Most of the "Watch" novels for example. "Small Gods" as another. However, when Pratchett actually gets on the big (ok, small) screen, they seem to make the worst choices possible. First it was the "Hogfather", which is probably one of the most esoteric and confusing Discworld novels out there. Now they take the very first Discworld novels which - while perhaps being the funniest in the series - do not really present what Pratchett's work is all about. These early two novels are basically Terry taking a jab at (but also making homage) to a fantasy genre in general. Well, perhaps the entire Discworld series is like that, but in "Color of Magic" and "The light fantastic" this parody takes the front seat while a coherent story and characters sit in the back. And this works well in written form, but as a cinematic narrative it simply fails; clever jokes get cut, simplified and/or drowned in the overall chaos, the plot has to move quickly so it is nearly impossible to absorb everything that happens (let alone enjoy it) and overall it represents a rather frustrating experience, both for the Pratchett fans as well as the general audience.The first thing that bothered me is the casting. Sean Austin is a fine Twoflower, even though I think it perhaps should have been cast by a more exotic-looking actor. David Jason, sadly, is a complete miss as Rincewind. This particularly bothers me since David is probably my favorite British actor; however he is just too likable to pull of a Rincewind. Someone like Rowan Atkinson channeling his Black Adder persona (but with less malice and much more cowardice) would be perfect. The thing is, you need to take pleasure in Rincewind constantly being put from one peril to the next; David's Rincewind is like a kooky old grandpa that you feel bad for when he gets thrown from a cliff, threatened or trampled on. And whenever he does something Rincewind-y (like taking off with Twoflower's gold), it actually feels out of character.The rest of the cast is hit-or-miss. Death is horribly puppet-like - I endured him in Hogfather but here the rubber skull should really have been lees pronounced. Vetinari is on par (even though in those early Discworld novels he most probably wasn't the "Patrician", but that's fan service for you). Tim Curry overplays Trymon to the extreme, but I guess this is due to the bad direction - many characters seem to be overacting their bits probably to infuse a sense of lightness and silliness. Just check out the faces leader of the Krull makes while doing his speech; inexcusable.However the biggest culprit is the plot. It is just too hectic, too chaotic and doesn't let the characters to develop or even establish themselves. This perhaps has a lot to with with (un)necessary exposition given by both the narrator and the characters - the plot hardly gets a chance to move along before the next bit of exposition has to get its turn.It's not all bad however. There are some superb actors involved in this, the sets and effect look fantastic (especially for a TV movie). And even though I said Jason makes a bad Rincewind, it still is a joy to watch this fine actor doing his schtick. And it IS Pratchett, after all.So I guess that bottom line I can give this a passing grade, but it's still a deeply disappointing venture. I hope they do "Guards! Guards!" next, and I hope they do it good.

I don't think other reviews on here have quite captured my feelings on David Jason's performance in this. He made for an excellent Albert in The Hogfather, but that will never in a million years make him Rincewind. I can think of about a million other people they could have cast. Mackenzie Crook from Pirates of the Caribbean and The Office would have been incredible, or the bloke who plays Superhans in Peep Show... why not? Fair enough I guess they wanted a big-name actor, but almost anyone else would have done the trick. What if, say, Eric Idle had done it? I can see that working. Well the point is that I could read off names all day, and I'm sure you can think of a handful more. Instead of all those actors, though, we've got David Jason reciting his lines veeeeeeeeeeery slooooooooowly. Rincewind is not stupid! He's an intelligent, shrewd guy who is made pathetic by his all-consuming cowardice and his utter inability to take a noble stance on any issue. David Jason acting like he's reading lines off an autocue does not cut it.This film is eye-gougingly bad. Tim Curry reprises his usual role from everything he's ever been in and plays a Massive Ham, and the special effects range from acceptable to woeful (some of the bluescreen stuff is appalling, and their attempt at dragons was beyond poor). The plot has been hacked to smithereens, which I expected, but what's less excusable is that the film does occasionally actually contradict the canon established in the books, which is senseless. I'm not even a massive fan of the books, but this film does NOT do them justice. Avoid!

Mr. Pratchett's books tend to be a bit nudge-nudge/wink-wink for my tastes. A little bit of Hitchhiker's Guide humor (or should that be humour?) goes a long way for us far less punny Yanks. So I've never read the book(s) that spawned this nearly 4-hour TV movie (seen last week on the ION Network in the U.S.).I didn't read the IMDb comments until after viewing, but I had the same bipolar "This is great" feeling during some scenes, and "This really sux" disdain during others. The cheesy budget constraints are a frequent stumbling block, as is the British tendency to keep speeding up scenes to fast-motion ala Benny Hill/Goodies/Python/BadNews/YoungOnes/etc. Poor substitute for genuine chuckles, which should have been aplenty, given the ludicrousness of the fantasy genre – An earlier comment mentions deviations from the book that "didn't make sense," but I disagree with most of the incidents he mentions. For instance, when the walking wardrobe (nice visual, but usually sped up like a Benny Hill chase-scene) seeks out Cohen the Barbarian to help his master, I just assumed the wardrobe – described as "fiercely protective of its owner" – recognized it needed heroic help to get Frodo's pal --- I mean the Worst Wizard's pal – out of his increasingly dangerous predicaments.And I certainly don't think we needed any more pit stops along the road to the distant finale, no matter how entertaining or troll-filled those pitsops may have been in the books.Tim Curry chews up all his scenes, and even seems to be paying tribute to (or gently mocking) several past roles with several sly bits of dialogue and inflection that harken back to Legend, Times Square, Annie, Spamalot, the Shout, and even Rocky and a couple of his cartoon villains.I didn't know Christopher Lee was Death until after viewing but, wow, his scenes were among the best! I loved how he just pops up out of nowhere whenever someone's life is on the line, seemingly caught in the middle of whatever he was doing at the time and becoming increasing bitter that his sharpened scythe is only scooping up uncredited extras and no marquee stars. You can tell much of what little budget there was went into tinting and partly animating his sequences, each of them terrific. I actually laughed aloud when our intrepid Tourist said, on the reaper's own monochromatic porchstep, "How often does one get to be at Death's door?" So the movie seems to be a low-budget but fairly accurate TV transcription of Pratchett's usual entry-level teen fiction take on the fantasy genre. Yeah, it's boneheaded at times, but at least the low common denominator it aims for is usually a funny denominator. To paraphrase the late Don Thompson, If you LIKE that sort of thing, this is that sort of thing.