The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising is one in a long line of films that made one incalculable mistake: it didn’t beat Harry Potter to the theater. Nearly as underwhelming as last year’s Eragon, The Seeker is yet another film based on a popular children’s fantasy book series that has a few unique ideas, but ultimately succumbs to being too similar to already adapted fare. At this point, Harry Potter is simply too big for The Seeker, so it feels all-too-familiar and exhaustingly rehashed.

Will Stanton (Alexander Ludwig) struggles to adjust to his seemingly normal London life as a 14 year-old boy with too many brothers, a dad who is lost in his work, and shyness around girls (namely the tempting Amelia Warner). When he is confronted by a threatening black-cloaked “rider” (Christopher Eccleston) and shape-shifting crows, he resorts to the help of a secretive group of warriors who educate him on the war between light and dark and his destiny as a “seeker” of six tokens that will aid in restoring power to the light and resultantly saving the world.

There are amusing ideas lurking behind the misguided setup and meager character development. Unfortunately, Harry Potter, with its seven novels and eventual seven films (ironically the seventh son of a seventh son is of importance) have all but exhausted the witches, wizards and sorcery theme. The villain’s control over animals, such as crows and snakes is a refreshing change from the humdrum magic, as is the shape-shifting of several of the characters and elementals. The introduction for the characters is entirely too fast, however. An entire world of wonder and amazement involving magic and time travel must be established so that viewers can comfortably immerse themselves in a suspension of disbelief that is inevitably expected when dealing with such fantastical circumstances. Instead, ample time is not spent fleshing out The Seeker‘s universe and so one of the characters must lifelessly ramble on about every detail in the film. Characters must monotonously narrate too many elements that the film fails to show us.

A war between light and dark rages on, just like the light side and dark side of The Force from the Star Wars trilogy, the light and dark of the Day Watch trilogy, the good and evil in The Lord of the Rings, and countless other mythical fables that essentially pit good versus bad. None of it works for The Seeker because it still feels too much like recycled elements from other already established and successful franchises. Too much is also left unexplained, as Will Stanton learns of his magical powers one minute and instantly knows how to use them the next. Similarly the villain’s origins, motives and powers are incredibly ambiguous.

Time travel is always a sticky endeavor, and here the film doesn’t attempt to explain its rhyme and reason or bother to allow it to make any sense. From traveling to 1690, to the era of the Vikings, to cockfighting in “whenever that took place”, the film often tries so diligently to take itself seriously that it comes up just short of utterly nonsensical. Big-budget special effects and absolutely no advertising categorize this film as essentially only for those who don’t want to wait for the next Harry Potter film and don’t mind watching muddled, poorly-developed, straight-to-DVD fodder.

SCORE = 3/10

– MoviePulse