Brilliant and touching

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

I must admit that I was quite excited when I was wondering through the video shop to discover that they had made a live-action version of Terry Pratchett's original discworld novels (this movie covers the first two books, Colour of Magic and Light Fantastic). I believe that I have seen an animated version but I thought it was cool to see them actually turn the books into a telemovie. I guess it was going to happen sooner rather than later considering the popularity of the Discworld Novels, and after the popularity of Lord of the Rings, Hollywood has been attempting, on numerous occasions, to replicate the success.Discworld, I will have to admit, is one of the more original novels that have appeared since the phenomenal success of Lord of the Rings, and I suspect that their success is not only due to Pratchett's writing style, but also because it is quite amusing. I tend to call Discworld the Hitchhikers Guide for fantasy worlds. The plot itself is not very original as it involves a quest and saving the world, but the world itself and the characters, once again while not strictly original, still stand apart from the typical fantasy novels.It is the characters that I will be looking at here, beginning with Rincewind. Now Rincewind is a wizard that has pretty much failed wizardry. He is like one of those perpetual students that has never successfully completed a university course and has thus spent the rest of his life trying, and failing, to get out of university. The reason is because, as a dare, he opened a powerful spellbook (which contains the eight spells that hold Discworld together) and one of the spells leap from the book into his head, and ever since he has never been able to master magic (because the spell in his head simply does not give him enough space to learn any more spells. Further, Rincewind is not a hero, he is a coward, and spends his time trying to escape from danger only to find himself slap bang in the middle of it. He is not a man with a goal or a quest beyond simply surviving. In subsequent books (and not all of the Discworld novels are based around Rincewind) he is no different, but I digress.Next we have Twoflower. He is a tourist who has traveled from the legendary continent of gold to visit Anhk Morpork simply to look around. This, like the rest of Discworld, is poking fun at aspects of our culture using Discworld as the vehicle of comment. One might think it strange that somebody would travel halfway across the world simply to look at something, but we have a whole industry devoted to this. However, personally, until you have done it, one really does not understand the nature of tourism. Granted people did not do thus until at least the 18th Century, and even then travel was slow and people never traveled far for any reason beyond business or war. With industrialisation, and the increase in the speed of travel, things changed, however, prior to that, if somebody where to travel half way around the world, they generally did not return.One wonders if Twoflower is supposed to be Japanese or American. I always envisaged him as American, but I read somewhere that he was supposed to be Japanese, which is not surprising since back when the book was writing people all saw the Japanese as being perennial tourists. In fact it seemed at the time that Australia rode on the Japanese Tourist's back. Things have changed since Japan's time in the economic sun is over, but now we are seeing them replaced by Chinese tourists. Personally, I like traveling halfway around the world to look at stuff, but to me there is a lot more to looking at stuff than simply looking at it and saying 'gee, isn't that beautiful'.There are a number of other characters as well, such as Cohen the Barbarian. No guesses as to who this is supposed to be, though it should be noted that he is actually very old. Despite his age, he is still a very, very effective fighter. Out of all of the characters I liked Cohen the best, simply because he is pretty much unique. Who has ever heard of the hero of a fantasy novel being a geriatric barbarian who does not know when it is time to retire. Finally there is the luggage. Normally suitcases are background props, but not in Terry Pratchett. The luggage is not a prop but a character in its own right, and a psychotic and uncontrollable one at that. He also has developed a strong attachment to Rincewind, much to the laters horror.Look, I liked this film, I thought is was done quite well, and while there may be questions as to how faithful it is to the original books, I personally thought they could have done a lot worse. Rincewind's character was portrayed well, and while I was not what I had conjured in my head (I thought he was a lot younger) it did make a lot of sense. It is funny that watching films like this make me want to go back to reading these books again, though I must admit that I have a lot of other books on my shelf that have a higher priority than a re-read of a Terry Pratchett novel.

Our family loved this movie. We have seen both Hogfather and The Color of Magic. Both are excellent movies. The Color of Magic has some slow spots, but the ending is wonderful and worth the time spent. The characters develop very well. For the most part the acting is very good and the special effects are excellent. The cinematography overall is of very good quality. The only drawback to the movie is there are some scenes that were not necessary and over-explained the story. I have not read the novel so I do not know how the movie compares to the book, however, the movie is very enjoyable, and in being so respects the work of the author. We highly recommend this fun, family movie.

I love the books - full of humour, action, and a laff-a-minute. This production is anything but. It is sloooooow, it is baaaaaaad, it is boooooooring. Even the "action" scenes are sloooow and ponderous.The casting is abysmal (I mean - grandpappy David Jason as Rincewind? Come ON!!!) Even the actors that *could* have been good make their best to outbad each other - Tim Curry vies for the Ham of the Year Award; Jeremy Irons, who could have made a *fabulous* Patrician if he only tried, turns what should have been a cold and calculating character into an effeminate fop with a speech impediment; and Sean Astin simply ruins every scene he is in (which is virtually the entire movie) by mustering all the acting skills of a grade school pageant.All in all - simply shockingly BAD! I really had to steel myself not to turn it off after 30 minutes.This is not a movie for watching, this a movie for lying down and AVOIDING!

Terry Pratchett has admitted that the first three books in his Discworld series ("The Colour of Magic," "The Light Fantastic," and "Equal Rites") are not very good, and recommends that new readers start with his fourth book ("Mort").I was nevertheless optimistic when I heard they were making a movie adaption of "The Colour of Magic" and "The Light Fantastic" (to be called, simply, "The Colour of Magic"), because I saw this as a chance for the powers that be to edit out all of the boring/unnecessary/clichéd parts, and update the story a bit to better fit in with how the Discworld has eventually evolved.Sadly they didn't do this, and "The Colour of Magic" is merely a stiff, poorly acted encapsulation of the two books, where the principles are rigidly walked through all the important plot points, before being whisked away, often with no real justification, to the next plot point.There was almost nothing to like about this movie, except to say that the sets were very pretty. Most of the laugh-lines were blown, and many parts of the plot just do not make sense. The acting isn't very good, and while the special effects are good by BBC standards -- this is setting the bar so ridiculously low that it is practically a meaningless statement.I really didn't like this movie. "Hogfather" was much better, and I have high hopes for "Going Postal."