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I haven't even bothered with the movie. I've noticed that in interviews Paolini is always rather careful in his remarks about the movie, generally saying things like "The movie is Fox's interpretation of my story" or similar. I watched the Harry Potter films hoping for bits of info about the backstory (particularly insights into that marvelously ambiguous character, Snape), but I don't see any point in subjecting myself to a bad copy of a weak first book.
As far as that first book goes, heck, the kid was 15. I can cut him some slack. The thing I find interesting is how he was able to make use of that when writing the second book-- the immaturity of the first book comes across somewhat as the immaturity and simplistic viewpoint of the main character, and the improvement in the second book fits nicely with the character becoming more mature. Paolini did plot out all three books before writing the first one, so while some of this may be by chance, some may be by design.
As examples of changes between the two books, I found myself mentally complaining about a variety of points in the first book, e.g. generally weak female characters, dwarves borrowed wholesale from earlier authors with no enhancements (why doesn't anyone ever show us females and children?), very similar names and invented language words to Tolkein, farm boys displaying outrageous levels of previously unsuspected talent, all-evil intelligent races, wise magical creatures which choose their riders, etc. All of these were addressed at least in some measure in Eldest, usually very strongly from the first few pages, with hints of more to come in the third book. If I'm right in my suspicions about where he's going with the story, that third book has some very strong potential.
Paolini commented in an interview that when he received the audio version of Eragon and listened to it for the first time, he found himself cringing. I think every author has moments of "I can't believe I wrote that." I've heard that Knopf's editors did a lot of work with Paolini helping him clean up the first book, and a bit more might have been good, but again, I now suspect that some of the derivative content of the first book is deliberate, for contrast with the second book. If Paolini were to rewrite Eragon, I'm sure there are many things he would change. But I think his efforts would be better invested in finishing this trilogy and then going on to other stories, which is apparently what he plans on doing.
Just my 2 cents,
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