The Mortal Instruments Movie

After getting up the carpet and tile in the basement, I sat down to work on a commission and popped in the Direct to Video movie version of Cassandra Clare's City of Bones. It obviously had a good budget because it had a lot of nice special effects and design work--the sets were perfect with what I saw as the descriptions in the book; and I liked the casting of Jace, Clary and Simon, as well as Luke and Clary's mom. The plot was compressed to fit the movie and for the first 2/3rds I though it actually improved the flow of the story, though I am guessing for anyone who hadn't read the books they would be like me on Tumblr, with "I have no idea what I am looking at" being the most likely reaction. It doesn't help that there are 6 books, a Byzantine plot and a cast of hundreds. There were some small things that I would have changed--I thought Alex needed to look younger, gay romance or not, and he needed to have a visible matching tattoo with Jace, or it didn't make much sense that Alex disliked Clary so much in the beginning. And Valentine was ridiculous--he didn't look anything like the description in the books. I was looking forward to flaming angelic swords, though the glass versions were ok. Also I think it would have made more sense that if they were going to tinker with the last part of the book anyway, they should have made the movie at least as self-contained as the book--instead they chose to leave a million loose ends for a series that I doubt will happen; which is too bad because I really liked the sets, and the costumes, and I would have liked to have seen the creepy Fae court in movie form. And it looked like Isabelle and Simon would have had a cute screen romance, and Jace and Clary were fine actors as well. Bah. I'd say rent it anyway if you can get it for a 1.50 at Family Video.