I had the pleasure of attending the London Expo today and was among the first in the world to see a teaser of upcoming fantasy flick "Eragon", along with being in the audience for lead star Edward Speleers first ever interview.

Unfortunately no one was allowed to video the footage, so I´m afraid you´re going to have to rely on my memory for a description here! Anyway, here´s what the footage basically showed:

The teaser started with a voice over talking about a "time of legends" and "a land shrouded in darkness", and then introduced us to Edward Speleers as Eragon. In the footage we saw him receive his dragon egg, be told it will only open when it has a bond with its dragon rider, and Jeremy Iron´s character telling him that he was a dragon rider. Multiple brief scenes followed of what looked like Eragon using a sword similar to that in the display picture above (although we only saw a hand wielding it), a huge battle with lots of warriors in armour, plenty of vast landscape style shots a la “Lord of the Rings”, and John Malkovich´s King character looking very brooding and menacing.

There was hardly any effects shots shown (apparently because they are still making them!), but there were two extremely brief early effects shots of a dragon passing by the camera over head. You really couldn´t see much apart from the outline of a seemingly blue Dragon flying extremely fast! In terms of an indication of how good it was, the audience cheered a little when the dragon flew past at the end, but there was still quite a few audience members who walked out as soon as it finished, so you can tell that although it wasn´t bad, it was obviously still not quite amazing yet! Let´s just say that the audience who watched this footage weren´t in a similar frenzy to those that saw “Superman Returns” footage for the first time at the Comic Con in the States!

The teaser footage also gave extremely brief shots of Sienna Guillory, Joss Stone, and Djimon Hounsou in action, although again it was way too brief to make any judgements on quality of acting in the movie yet! The footage just hyped all the actors Oscar Nominations, and Wins each time one appeared on screen.

Finally the teaser seemed to love emphasising the fact that ILM and Weta Effects were bringing this movie to life and that it would be the next great fantasy blockbuster. It would have been nice to see a bit more of what they have to boast about, but never mind!

Despite the truly tiny amount of footage I saw, I think it´s fair to say that this is looking a darn sight better than Jeremy Irons most recent dragon based flick, "Dungeons and Dragons", but then again that´s not saying much! To be honest, it´s a bit early to say whether it could match "Harry Potter" or "Lord of the Rings", but Edward Speleers was adamant it could do in his interview. I also must say that whoever interviewed Speleers at the Expo was pretty terrible, he asked him some very standard run of the mill dull questions, involving being cast from obscurity and acting against blue screen. When asked about how the film was unique from "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter", he said the story was very heart-warming, although I got the impression that he said that because didn´t know what else to say about it?!? The one time he did ask the interesting question of as to whether Speleers has yet seen any concepts of the dragon, Speleers could only reply that he had seen as much as we just had, so again I´m afraid not much indication yet of just what the dragons will look like in detail! I think if they had given the audience the chance to do a Q and A with him we might have got some more interesting information to write up as they seemed to be more clued up on the book than the interviewer, but never mind!

As for Edward Speleers himself, he came across as a very down to earth young star, but again this was his first ever public appearance as one so that might change! He signed a shed load of autographs at the end of the presentation, all for free might I add, so he was a good sport in that respect. When asked about how the film was unique from "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter", he said the story was very heart-warming, although I got the impression that he said that because didn´t know what else to say about it?!?

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