What’s in a name?

I watched part of Earthsea last night and tonight—the SciFi channel miniseries. I adore the Earthsea books; Le Guin is one of my favorite authors, and these books have a beautiful lyrical quality of seriousness and thoughtfulness and fantasy and truth. But this movie was so awful. Terrible terrible dialogue. And let’s just say that the movie wasn’t remotely faithful to the books.

Fortunately I never have any faith that film adaptations of my favorite books will be any good, so therefore I’m not disappointed. I almost didn’t watch it—but I couldn’t help it. It’s like a terrible car accident—it’s so hard not to look, even though you know it’ll be gruesome. The moment they lost me was quite early on—they changed the main character’s name! Why would you make a film based on books and change something so fundamental (and names are incredibly fundamental here)? Never mind everything else they changed. Sounds like Le Guin wasn’t very happy herself.

Nothing about a dreadful miniseries changes those beautiful books. But still it feels like a desecration to me.