Before it opens, I wanted to mention that █████ and I saw a preview screening of The Passion of the Lion last week. No, wait, I meant Narnia Wars Episode II: A New Hope. No, that's wrong too....
However you slice it, the movie version of the first (or second, depending on how you reckon it) of C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is a reasonably engaging piece of entertainment. It's acted well, the special effects are in many cases astonishing (and sometimes not), and it must be said that Tilda Swinton makes for a scarily alluring White Witch, especially in her shaggy barbarian battle getup toward the end of the film. What it wasn't was particularly memorable. It sort of fizzed during viewing and evaporated outside the theater.
I'm not sure why this is. Probably to many fingers in the (fairly faithful) screenplay, and not a sure and compelling enough directorial vision. I was not a fan of the Lord of the Rings movies (which makes me something of an an anomaly in SF circles), but I will say this for Peter Jackson—I probably remember the sights and spectacle of The Fellowship of the Ring better four years after seeing it than I remembered TCoN:TLtWatW after four days. That said, I certainly wouldn't steer fantasy fans away from seeing it.
I had two interesting thoughts while watching the film. First is that, with all the outreach Disney has done to Christian groups, I wondered whether hard-core Christians would be a) more friendly toward fantastic literature after seeing it, or b) severely disturbed at the portrayal of such pagan and Bacchanalian figures as fauns and nymphs as good and friendly creatures.
My second thought was really more of an aside, but one that █████ shared. When the White Witch rides onto the climactic battlefield in a chariot drawn by two polar bears, we both saw that as an in-jokey slap at vociferous Narnia-hater Philip Pullman and the good polar bears of His Dark Materials.
That's as may be. Now, for a fascinating dissection of why C.S. Lewis may not have been quite the über-Christian he is seen as on this side of the Atlantic, check out Adam Gopnik's "Prisoner of Narnia" from the November 21 New Yorker. It's not just an insightful look at Lewis the man; it's also a consideration of why fantastic literature should matter to skeptics and believers alike:
The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images—the street lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse—are as much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. [full article]
See, we're not all that different after all.
