Watching The Colour of Magic [Spoilers!]

Warning: spoilers ahead. Don’t read on if knowing anything about the story will ruin your enjoyment of the book and/or TV adaptation.

It’s always weird when you’ve read a book and you get to see it on the screen. It felt kind of odd watching the first Harry Potter movie, because things were never quite as I imagined them. I had the same feeling watching Sky’s adaptation of The Colour of Magic but, just like watching HP, I enjoyed the experience!

First thing’s first: I hadn’t realised that this is more than just an adaptation of The Colour of Magic, but actually covers The Light Fantastic as well. That’s great, because I think TLF is a much more dramatic book than TCoM (sorry, I’m going to start using acronyms because the titles could get rather boring otherwise). I guess Terry Pratchett was still finding his feet on the Discworld when he wrote TCoM, so it’s good to see the inclusion of the second book on screen. What that does mean, though, is that the producers have had to compress two detailed books into three hours and, sometimes, the storyline suffers because of it. There are points where things happen (for instance, Twoflower selling Broadman fire insurance) that make perfect sense in the book but seem a little random in this version. Things move along very quickly at other points where a bit more background would have been welcome, and some things are completely missed out altogether. I know this happens with every movie adaptation of a book, so I shouldn’t have been that surprised… but I’m still going to whine about it :)

Sean Astin was a little odd in the role of Twoflower, but that falls into the realm of “not how I imagined him”, so I can get over that. David Jason, however, as Rincewind was great. Again, not as I imagined, but I got used to him very quickly. Tim Curry as Trymon was another great choice. Actually, the casting was pretty good on the whole, although if I’m honest some of the acting was a bit wooden.

Visually, the whole thing was a treat. Ankh-Morpork looked fantastic, which was probably one of the things I was looking out for most. The dragons looked great, and the whole Wyrmberg sequence was very well done. The only gripe about the Wyrmberg was, in fact, that it was just too briefly introduced! The luggage looked exactly as I imagined, and was nice and menacing when it had to be. The whole area of wizards was another that I was very keen to see how it turned out, and the answer is, “not too badly”. The university looked pretty good, although I always thought it opened right out onto a large square… it seemed to open out onto an alleyway in the movie. The Tower of Art was the prominent landmark I always thought, and the wizards themselves were a great mix of being powerful magicians and completely clueless idiots.

All in all, this was a great watch. It looked pretty decent, and moved along at a fair pace. My only complaint though is that without reading the books I think I would have been pretty lost by how it moved on and how some things were introduced a bit suddenly. That said, I hear they’re looking at televising “Going Postal” next, and if it’s anything like as good as this I’ll be looking forward to it!

One final thing, it was good to see Terry Pratchett himself making an appearance again (as one of the Krullian scientists). I can’t help hoping against hope that something is found to help delay the onset of his Alzheimer’s.

Related reading (auto-generated):

• Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal [Review]
• Going Postal: Coming Soon
• The Colour of Magic

Tagged as: Discworld