prkamm I would like to hold out as a little ray of light amongst the sea of overwhelming negative reviews of the 2004 "Earthsea" miniseries. Yes, I have read LeGuin's "Earthsea" trilogy, and will gladly concede that there are some points of divergence between the books and this television adaptation. As with many things in life, however, all things are relative: this miniseries could have been much worse! The acting is passable, and I found it entertaining to watch, once I accepted that it wasn't going to be minutely faithful to the books. In short: it's a lot better than nothing for now. Watch it and enjoy it for what it is.If you want to see adaptations which have REALLY massacred the original literary plot, try watching (as much as you can stomach) the 2002 version of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine". (The 1960 version comes highly recommended, however!) And for the worst ever sacrilege done to a sci-fi literary classic, check out 1998's "Nightfall". It's unfortunate that Isaac Asimov was still alive when that abomination came to light.

pvanja If Ursula LeGuin was dead, she would be turning in her grave. Since she isn't, she can only watch in horror how they mangled one of the best fantasy series ever written. Almost every character looks and behaves like an idiot, especially those who are kind and good. Bad guys are even worse. You can see that they spend a lot of money in this productions, it doesn't look cheap or unpolished, but it's completely wasted. Writers, or whoever is responsible, used the book as a very faint guideline, but their story makes little sense; if I haven't read the book before, I am not sure I would "catch their drift". A very sad attempt and a waste of time. Better see anime version.

zapdude Having just watched this harmless, derivative, typically mediocre production, I was curious how others received it. After reading a few of the comments here, I'm adding mine.First, I have never read an Earthsea book. Therefore, all I perceived was a rather middle-level "typical" fantasy story. I got a kick out of what I thought was a cheesy ripoff of Harry Potter at the wizard's school, it was so clearly a copy that it would have been laughable at any time.The acting and production values were, simply, typical Hallmark. Not great, not awful, just bread-on-the-table pulp of the sort that keeps people employed.If you look at the entire Fantasy/Science Fiction film industry, there are rarely any that are actually better, and many that are a LOT worse (notably better: Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, notably worse: 2001's Planet of the Apes) Now that I've said that, if I had been an Earthsea fan, I probably would have been just as furious and felt just as betrayed as anyone commenting here. Clearly, only fans of a book or series should be involved in producing movie versions.

com-3 Do not waste your time searching for similarities between this hack script and the excellent Earthsea Trilogy (now 6 books...) by Ursula Le Guin. The scriptwriters have taken a beautifully formed creature, stripped it of all its flesh, and broken the skeleton into small pieces. They have then selected a few small shards of bone from the original, around which they have woven a thin tissue of totally new skin to cover their abomination.We all know it is virtually impossible to condense a rich book satisfactorily into a film or TV format, but Lieberman and Scott have paid scant heed to Le Guin's original. Not even the characters' names have been respected and the roles they play are largely fresh fabrications.Some poor adaptations can be justified insofar as they are, in themselves, worth watching. I am afraid this is not even true of this series. It is entirely derivative (but not, unfortunately, from the books from which it has taken its title).