#will stanton

Round 1

The one piece of information he does remember, that is a specific date:

He is, but honestly I can't hold that against him, because the character he was asked to play was just... not Will Stanton.

Like, I keep harping on about 'Will, a character who has to be reminded by his boyfriend/platonic soulmate that girls are attractive, now has a plotline based around being obsessed with his brother's girlfriend to the point where he whinges to Merriman about his Old One powers not being able to "get the girl"' because of course I do, but even without that Will is nothing like his book counterpart.

Granted, Will is a difficult character to cast for a movie - he's an 11-year-old boy who's occasionally an ageless force of magic who can casually threaten what's heavily implied to be actual gods, if a Dark is Rising adaptation was announced today and they said they'd be making Will older I wouldn't begrudge them that - but movie!Will is the worst possible way to get around that issue. Not only is he older than his book counterpart, he's less mature - this isn't even the Percy Jackson movie problem of character arcs that made perfect sense for 11 and 12 year olds not fitting 16 going on 20 year olds, the movie goes out of its way to make Will dumber than the source material.

Like, prime example: in Chapter 3 of the Dark is Rising, Will is tricked into opening up the Doors to the Dark, which has immediate catastrophic consequences and results in the Lady being out of commission for most of the rest of the series. He does this because the Dark mimic Will's family, pretending they're being tortured outside, and Will as an untrained Old One, still thinking like an 11-year-old boy, is tricked into believing it. Then, eight chapters later, when the Rider has compelled Will's sister Mary and is threatening to order her to drown herself if Will does not surrender the Signs, Will uses the memory of this mistake to stand firm, knowing that the Dark will kill Mary regardless of if he hands over the Signs or not. It's a clear arc, probably the clearest example of the growth Will goes through in the first book, as well as being a really cool and disturbing scene in its own right.

I say this because, just before the final climactic fight of the movie, Will is tricked into opening the Doors by the Dark, who proceed to destroy, not just the Lady, but all of the Old Ones, because the Dark mimics Will's family, pretending they're being tortured. This is supposed to be the end of Will's arc, like literally the scene after this he drives away the Dark, but he's still acting like the idiotic whingeing brat he's been all movie, less intelligent, I cannot stress this enough, than his 11-year-old counterpart. That's not an acting choice, that's the incompetence of putting the beginning of Will's character arc at the end of the goddamn movie.