The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

When this movie was new and in the theaters I wrote about why I found myself with surprisingly little interest in seeing it, but emphasized that as I hadn't seen it, this was an uninformed opinion.

Well, I've seen it now, so this is an informed opinion. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If we don't nail it to a perch it'll be pushing up the daisies. I didn't like it. A few jumbled thoughts on why:

First of all, the special effects, particuarly on the talking animals, should be lesson one in a class called "Why CGI is not always the answer."

And because the film is PG, there are some ridiculous cuts and story choices sparing us the agony of seeing children becoming involved in violence...which is only what the story's about.

Worst of all, there is a hushed, quasi-religious tone to much of the dialogue and the way it's delivered that's unbearable. It's the same sense I get for much of the Star Wars movies once Lucas stopped trying to make popcorn movie homages to saturday afternoon matinees and became reborn as George Lucas: Mythmaker. It's not as bad as the dialogue in the latter Star Wars movies (nothing, at no time, has ever been as bad as the dialogue in the latter Star Wars movies), but it's hideously bloated with self-importance.

"Bloated" is a good term to describe the whole film, actually. I believe judicious editing could have trimmed it down to a neat 90 minutes or so instead of two hours and 15 minutes. But it was made while epic film lengths were still hot (I think King Kong may have killed that for a while) and so we get lengthy battle scenes in which I didn't care about any of the characters, and so had no emotional investment.

Terry Gilliam once said that only when he saw Steven Spielberg's Hook did he appreciate how good his own Adventures of Baron Munchausen really was. Films like this and the aforementioned Lucas films underscore for me what an achivement the Harry Potter movies and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy are.

I suppose I can offer sympathy to the director Andrew Adamson on two or three points. He's not as ood a filmmaker as jackson, but I think Tolkien was also a better writer than Lewis, so he wasn't working witb as rich source material.

Lewis' children heroes are uniformly horrible people to the extent that I was grateful for a wolf attack breaking up their innocent games. They're not inspiring, they're blah. Unlike the main trio in the Potter movies of Harry, Hermoine, and Ron-I think the characters are the best part of those films.

It's been years since I re-read any of the Narnia books, but I did try to read another of Lewis' works not long ago and couldn't even get through the first few pages.

Also, Adamson was between a rock and a hard place, really. He rarely even attempts any shots with the artistry of Jackson, true...but when he does, a voice that sounds remarkably like that little kid on South Park can be heard saying "Lord of the Rings did it!"