Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - Movie Review

I'm not going to waste time by attempting to explain the plot of this movie: I suspect most adults have already seen some TV adaptation or read the book. Besides, this is not a movie that you choose to see based on whether you think you would like the plot. This is a movie that you choose to see because you want to see real fantasy done well. This is high fantasy: the plot is secondary and good always triumphs. Hurrah!

A great movie for all ages

I didn't go into the cinema expecting anything other than pretty special effects. I got a very pleasant surprise. Narnia delivers excellent plotting and pacing throughout, good acting, good casting, excellent voice talent, more than competent direction and a visual tour de force. Compared to the flailing mess of hacksaw marks and protracted low quality 'innovation' that was Lord of the Rings, or the somewhat patchy translation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Narnia is a perfectly crafted piece that held my interest througout.

A film of a book that doesn't think it knows best

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe shows us how a film conversion should be done. There are no significant spurious inventions, the characters aren't changed, the roles of important characters are not altered, huge vital chunks of plot are not missing, it isn't mysteriously transplanted to America, and yet it never becomes bogged down in scenes that only work within the context of a book.

A movie for children, a film for adults

Whether you are old or your, and whether you know the story well or not at all, there is plenty to hold your attention. The child characters are faithful to the book and don't spout adult lines at every other turn. The computer animation is good enough to work seamlessly without becoming intrusive, distracting or alienating. The beavers, wolves, centaurs, minotaurs and other characters are characters, not just visual effects to 'wow' us. Though The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is not really the first in the Narnia series, it is almost certainly the most adapted, and for good reason. The book offers a gripping plot full of action, suspense, pathos and sacrifice, sorrow, loss, growth, rebirth and triumph. The other books, while good, don't cover quite such a wide range of experience or offer quite such perfectly paced action. No wonder that this story is the most popular of the chronicles. This movie adaptation captures all that is good in the book. That even I, tired old cynic and bitter critic that I am was impressed is a real measure of its success. If there is even a sliver of a childish love for the fantastic in you, you cannot fail to be entertained by this movie.

Funny animals and they're acting

The acting standard of the more human characters, such as Tumnus is far above what we would expect from a children's film and has none of the hammy tongue in cheek quality that tends to pervade the 'adults' of the Harry Potter movies. The Beavers, on the other hand, do deliver Potteresque comedy, but this serves as a foil to the gentle charisma of Tumnus, the inhuman otherworldliness of the Witch, or the hard boiled practicality of the wolves. Each character is done in their own way, and this serves up a variety that means there is something there that almost everyone will really appreciate.

It would have worked too if it wasn't for those meddling kids

The human children of the movie are excellently adapted from the book. Though their lines and scenes are by no means word for word identical, the sense and spirit of the original literary characters is perfectly preserved. I never found myself 'watching actors', but was completely immersed in the characters themselves. They have their limitations: they're only children after all, but this is a welcome change. The majority of children in movies are just little adults, spouting adult lines, and here we have something different. Children can be children without being trite, limited, pathetic or narrow. It's not a 'kids' movie in the same way that Unfortunate Events or luvvy Emma Thompson's latest vehicle is, but it does deliver characters that adults, and - I would imagine - children can relate to.

It's the world - you didn't expect it to be small did you?

The visual style of the film is far from understated, but strikes a good middle ground between the heavy handed cheese of Ridley Scott's Legend and the quasi-realism of Lord of the Rings. The colours of the encapsulating World War Two setting are intentionally drab and dark, tinted with cold greens and blues. Winter Narnia is both a picture postcard and a cold unforgiving wilderness, depending on requirement. The Witch's dungeons could not seem colder and her palace interior is suitably dark and menacing. Once the snow vanishes we are presented with blue skies and intense bright sunny colours. While these tricks are obvious, they still work, and they work well. Each season and setting is perfectly manufactured and provide an absolute feast of eye-candy, vast, deep landscapes and varied interiors. Just as the cast of characters provides a 'something for everyone' variety, so too the settings of the film provide a rich wealth of alternatives, each perfectly realised.

I don't believe it: English voices and they're not villains

We probably have Harry Potter to thank for the fact that it's now possible to make a mass market movie that isn't Americanised. My initial expectation was that the initial set up would be clumsily transplanted to New England or Washington State and the children would all have perfect generic American accents. I was quite surprised when I found the setting of the book left intact. I was absolutely stunned when the inhabitants of the fantastical world of Narnia turned out to provide a wide range of accents, with American sounding voices for some of the villains. Of course Tilda Swinton delivers an 'English' voice for the evil Witch Jadis (and she could certainly have done otherwise) but this works perfectly within the voice mix of the movie.

Far too often we have been served up with films that are blatantly nationalistic and divisive in their use of accent. It has long seemed that in US film making the only roles available to English actors that aren't prepared to fake an American accent are villains. I'm not sure that time is completely over, but we are seeing some signs that the absurd dogma that a US audience hates English voices has been debunked. Of course we still have movies like Constantine where an English character is converted into an American one for no strong or compelling reason, simply because nervous, play-it-safe film executives believe the old myth that American viewers demand American heroes. Whatever the true state of the political climate, Narnia has loads of great voice talent and doesn't restrict itself along national lines.

The Golden Bough and the subtext of C.S. Lewis appreciated

There was no doubt in my mind that the creators of this movie understood CS Lewis and the anthropological subtext of the Narnia Chronicles. What's more, they appreciated Lewis' work to the point that they didn't think it needed clumsy improvement. Unlike in a film series made by a certain New Zealander, who apparently mis-remembered a good deal of Tolkien and seemingly didn't fully understand much of what he did remember, here we have a movie that has a proper grasp of its underlying themes.

It's never too obvious, never jammed down the viewer's throat, but the conflict between late stone-age/early bronze-age matriarchal society and late bronze-age patriarchal society that C.S. Lewis intimately understood is present here. The film makers don't feel a need to destroy the original story in a misguided attempt to make it more modern. They are smart enough to realise that fantasy that has already stood the test of time and several generations of readers does not need modernising: they realise fantasy is not supposed to be modern and allow it to be itself.

While some analysts are fixated on Lewis' inclusion of 'biblical themes', this is a very strange way to come at the Narnia books. It's almost as the biblical scholars are determined to graft Christianity onto anything dealing with pre-Christian ideas, which the Narnia chronicles most certainly are. To view Narnia through a biblical keyhole is to confuse the original with the copy. That Christianity incorporates the sacrifice of a king is merely an ever-present theme that it borrows from the oldest religions (obvious examples such as Oriris or Dionysus spring to mind).

I was astounded by the background detail of the sacrifice scene, where we are clearly shown Jadis, an earth priestess trying to reinstate the ancient custom of kingly sacrifice. The 'monsters' representing the type of animal-totem tribes that were common in prehistoric Europe, and from whence originate our mythological centaurs, fauns, and other combinations of man and animal. We are show this through modern eyes, where the idea of the priestess trying to assume kingly power is considered wrong, evil, or at least likely to bring terrible luck. That Lewis based his fairy tale on this ancient theme gives his story some of the power and energy of the real fairy tales, which typically resonate full of this conflict.

Never for a moment does the film ever let the sub-text become the main text, and yet it is perfectly preserved, and perhaps even enhanced over what was clearly present in the book. Really, when a witch priestess is sacrificing a king on a stone altar, surrounded by standing stones and animal tribes/totems, you can't really believe this is a biblical story can you? How ignorant of the history of religion would you have to be when the whole thing reeks of ancient Greece, Britain or Germany?

Once the snow is gone, the costumes of the Witch clearly allude to the prehistoric era, and in the final battle we are presented with an obvious representation of a warrior priestess who embodies the goddess in the style of the Morrigan. The forces of civilization, 'rightful' patriarchy and the 'good' females who restrain themselves to their safe roles of care and nurture are arrayed against the 'destructive' female force and the uncontrolled primitive urges that drive it. The costumes and creature designs say it all: the side of good arrayed in shining steel (the iron age mind-set) and the animals emphasising their positive human characteristics, while the side of evil is a collection of beastly creatures that emphasise the brutal and animalistic, who are garbed in dark shades of leather and bronze (the stone and bronze age).

That the film makers were able to do this with such clarity, without in any way being obvious about it is probably what impressed me most about the film 'after the fact'. While I was watching, the performance of Tumnus and the fantastic visuals impressed me the most, but afterwards it was the ability to deal with complex themes without every becoming complicated that really won me over. The Thirteenth warrior is the last film I remember that took these themes so seriously, and it didn't do terribly well with them - though I'm fond of it, it has a lot of critics.

In short, this is one of the best movies for years that deals with anthropological themes, and it does it so well without compromising an iota of fun, plot, story, pacing or character to do it. Not a single part of the movie's mass appeal is diminished by the intelligent and subtle inclusion of sophisticated pre-historical themes.

The advertising voice of Aslan

If there was one tiny complaint I would make about the movie, it was that Liam Neeson as the voice of Aslan ended up sounding like a commerical for insurance. I think Aslan would have sounded better with a rougher, harder voice that imparted a little more wildness to him. The polished voice we do get, well, it is the voice of adverts for financial services. This was one thing that did diminish the experience a little. Given that everything else was so well done, I'm prepared to forgive them.

Tilda Swinton is one freaky...

After her otherworldly Gabriel in Constantine, Tilda must be a little nervous that she's only getting supernatural parts right now. Nevertheless, she does do it awfully well. With a combination of 'makeup' effects (they might be post processed CG) and her eerie inhuman acting, she provides a genuinely nasty Witch. She captures the not-quite-perfect attempt at being pleasant and the terrible anger of the witch queen perfectly. Her sword fighting scenes are excellent, though I'm not sure how much of that she did herself. What will she do next? A creepy artificial intelligence in a sci-fi movie? Something involving super heroes? Or perhaps back to a more normal drama? Whatever it is there's a good chance I will be watching it.

posted by Peter Wake @ 3:14 pm