Seventh Son
Seventh Son is a fantasy film, and fantasy films are almost never good. Before you draw your swords and roll to attack, this is coming from a genuine lover of fantasy, science fiction and all things that guarantee getting shoved in a locker. When I say this, it’s not out of some snobby conceit that fantasy is for children or anything like that. A 100-minute movie just simply isn’t enough time to do a fantasy story justice.
Seventh Son tells the story of Master John Gregory (Jeff Bridges, The Giver), a gruff but well-intentioned veteran of an ancient order of monster-slaying knights. Gregory recruits a young farmboy, Tom, (the very pretty Ben Barnes, By the Gun) to help him fight an evil witch named Malkin (Julianne Moore, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, doing her best).
If that sounds generic, that’s because it is. Creating an entirely new world is such a robust ambition there’s no time to truly develop a sense of setting. Seventh Son’s locales feel isolated with no sense of relation to each other. Tom lives in a house on a lake, then all of the sudden is in a town with Gregory. Is this the next town over? Have they traveled for many days? The two zip around the countryside from a walled city apparently called “The Walled City” to the witch’s mountain lair to many, many a precarious precipice, all seemingly instantaneously. There might’ve even been a second walled city, but I honestly couldn’t tell because everything looked the same. There’s no consistency or detail to the world.
There’s a reason most fantasy novels are doorstops hundreds of pages long. In fantasies, an entirely new world is being created, one where no assumptions can be made and everything is new. The best part of fantasy is discovering the secrets of those new worlds and learning how they work.
The key distinction to any work of fantasy is that it takes place in a world that is not our own. The ideal fantasy exploits that difference as much as possible and ties gaining an understanding of this new world into the plot itself. In Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time novels, understanding the setting’s cyclical nature of time and the secrets of its mythology is paramount to understanding the plot line. In BioWare’s Dragon Age series, the characters’ metaphysical questions of religion are integral to the plot. In George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, learning the truth of Jon Snow’s parentage is intertwined with understanding the ancient secrets of the world itself.
These writers realize the best use of a fantasy setting is in making it so that an understanding of the world is equated with an understanding of the self. Bad fantasy is a good guy battling evil. Mediocre fantasy is a good guy battling evil and also learning about himself. The best fantasy makes self-discovery and human emotion the same as battling evil.
It’s one of the most powerful ways to depict a coming-of-age journey. When one is young, the world feels like a vast uncharted territory, full of mystery and waiting to be explored. Fantasy makes that feeling a reality. In youth, and to a lesser extent, in the other stages of life, who we are is uncertain. Our fate is unknown and our identity undefined, a mystery to be solved. Fantasy takes that journey of self-discovery we all must make and amplifies it until it’s the most important problem in the world — which, of course, it is.
That brings us back to Seventh Son. Why does this film, like so many others in the genre, fail? For one, movies are inherently more concerned with the external than the internal, because you can’t see through a character’s eyes. A film simply cannot show the characters’ understanding of themselves in the way that, say, a novel can. Even if it were possible, the length of a single movie isn’t enough time to fully explore that rich inner world.
Without an appropriate amount of time to let the audience get to know the various locations and characters, Seventh Son must reduce every part of its setting to a generic trope and hope audiences get the picture. That leaves just the plot to carry the film, and unfortunately, Seventh Son doesn’t really deliver on that either. The plot is tired, the characters are cliched and any sense of excitement is fleeting at best.
Seventh Son attempts to capitalize on the fantasy craze started by Game of Thrones. If you think that comparison is unfair, Seventh Son invites it by casting Jon Snow himself, Kit Harington, as a bit part who has about three lines at the beginning and is never seen again. Why they cast an unknown — and untalented — actor in the lead role and made Harington, who has the distinction of being immensely marketable and talented, as essentially an extra, I will never understand. (OK, OK, maybe he couldn’t commit to a full feature shoot, but the studio still reaaaaally wanted to market the film as a fantasy film with Snow in it!)
All in all, the film is unremarkable but inoffensive. There’s no reason to hate it, but with all the wonderful fantasy to consume in the world, the kind of stuff that really ignites that sense of discovery and introspection, Seventh Son is a low point for the genre. It takes all the most basic tenets of fantasy — dragons, magic, swords — and forgets about all the things that truly make the genre shine: that sense of wonder and mystery not just about what lies beyond the horizon, but what resides within the soul.
