message in the movies By Rev. Bruce Batchelor Glader

                   
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe  Rated PG
Directed by Andrew Adamson. Starring Tilda Swinton, Georgie Henley

Photo © Walt Disney Pictures
As the city of London fights against Nazi air raids during World War II, the Pevensie children are evacuated to the countryside by their mother (Father’s off fighting the war) to stay out of harm’s way at the home of a kind professor.  While playing hide and seek, Lucy runs into a large wardrobe closet and moves past the fur coats into the winter wonderland of Narnia.  Narnia wasn’t always so cold, but it is now under the control of the White Witch.  Much to her amazement (and her brothers and sister, who join her), they are the “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve” who have been prophesied to save Narnia, with the help of the great lion Aslan.  Fans of C.S. Lewis’ epic Narnia fantasy are finally getting the big screen treatment of their books similar to Peter Jackson’s reimagining of JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”.  And, for the most part, the true believers seem to be happy with this first film in the seven-volume saga.  Like “Lord of the Rings”, the Narnia story is filmed in New Zealand and uses some of the same special effects shops as Jackson’s epic.  British actress Tilda Swinton embodies evil as the White Witch, and Liam Neeson provides magisterial authority as the voice of Aslan, Lewis’ Christ figure.  The young actors who play the Pevensie children are all good, with Georgie Henley doing a great job as Lucy.  And yet I left the movie somewhat disappointed, feeling that the film got all of the details right, but lost the heart of the story somewhere along the way.  Battles described in general terms in just a few brief paragraphs are given a large scale treatment.  The sacrifice of Aslan is offered in grisly ghoulish detail that recalled Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ”.  And the film just seemed to go on too long. At 2 hours and 20 minutes for viewing, a reasonably fast reader could read the book in less time.  In fact, that’s just what I did when I returned home from the film.  The book is still beautiful and magical in its own right, and it is the written form of Narnia that I want to live on in my imagination.

Pitchfork Rating: Four halos. (C.S. Lewis’ epic children’s fantasy is faithfully recreated, with Christian values intact.)   One pitchfork. (Quite a bit of nasty violence, including children killing people with real swords; you might want to keep children under eight years old from seeing this.)

 

past movie reviews