We went to see The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at a very late showing on Friday night (got home around 2am). It was very nicely done. I think it will be one of those movies that kids will watch for many years in the future, even though it’s no Harry Potter.
I don’t mean that in a “omg, it sucked compared to Potter” way. Part of the problem with Narnia is that it’s a distant memory for most readers (if they read it at all), while we’re right in the thick of Harry Potter mania. [Full disclosure: I never finished Narnia. My recollections of it come from the BBC tv series years ago.]
But one thing everyone needs to remember is that it is a children’s book. It is not The Lord of the Rings. Any negative reviews I have seen of the movie seem to center on the fact that it wasn’t as deep or rich as Tolkien’s work. Well duh! It’s not supposed to be. It’s got fricking Santa Claus in it, for crying out loud!
Yes, C.S. Lewis did try to make a Christian allegory out of it (sort of… Lewis said it wasn’t allegory, because Aslan did not represent Jesus but “…he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ This is not allegory at all.” Picky, picky.) However, it never goes very deep into the characters. They are all pretty much black-and-white, good or evil. In fact, one of the best things about this movie version is that it gives a little more depth to Edmund, instead of just making him a greedy little so-and-so who’d rat out his siblings for Turkish Delight.
Anyway, forgetting all that hullabaloo, it’s a very good movie with some pretty powerful scenes. I especially liked the sequence where Lucy meets Mr. Tumnus, the faun, and the Stone Table scene (of which I will not speak, lest ye be spoiled). And Tilda Swinton was deliciously evil as the White Witch. The special effects were magical, as expected, and the producers kept from straying into some sort of modern version of the story (that may be due to the fact that Douglas Gresham, Lewis’ stepson, was a co-producer).
