A "review" of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1362 words)

As I stated last night, I went out and watched The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was OK. Walking out of the theater, Jeff and I had a brief conversation about what bothered us about the movie.

It didn't have pacing problems.

It had good characters and good interaction.

The battle sequences were competent and the special effects were top notch.

And yet, something was off. Something about C. S. Lewis's story was itching away at us. It was just ever so slightly wrong.

The story, for those of you who, like me, haven't read any of the books, is straight-forward. A small cabal of English children move to the country and board with a distant friend of their mother's/relative/ancillary character/mean old man who's really just a teddy bear of a humanitarian/professor who just so happens to have a magical wardrobe ("The Wardrobe") that's a gateway to another world if you walk into it backwards.

Of course, the youngest girl finds this out first and no one believes her. The next youngest boy discovers it soon afterwards, and he immediately gets chummy chummy with a very nice pale lady who makes nummies instantly out of single drops from a flask of magic juice. Kind of like how a witch might do it. She ("The Witch") cannot possibly be evil in any way whatsoever because she feeds him candy, right?

Eventually the entire family winds up in this land, where they are immediately pushed into the crux of Yet Another Battle Between Good and Evil. Turns out there's this prophecy, you see, and it's going to come true. Not eventually, of course, but almost immediately. The children are humans ("sons of Adam" and "daughters of Eve" as they are called), and it is writ that four humans will bring about the end of The Witch and her never-ending winter and return Narnia to sunshine and lollipops forever. Everybody not directly working for The Witch believes this prophecy because a lion ("The Lion") struts around really confidently and says so. Everybody loves The Lion because he's pretty much The Oracle from The Matrix: he bakes cookies, everybody else just gushes about him, and he's constantly telling you that everything's going to be OK.

One problem I had with the movie was how it handled the maturation sequence. This story, like most other works of juvenile fiction, is in part a coming of age story. Children go in in the beginning, men and women come out at the end. In Dune the maturation sequence was Paul camping in a still tent overnight with his mother. In The Red Badge of Courage, it's, well, the red badge of courage. I think in Where the Red Fern Grows it's chopping down a tree. Every story has one. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe it's — and I'm not making this up — when Santa Claus shows up and gives the three good children presents.

That's right. Jolly Saint Nick makes a cameo in this movie. There's a lot of sound and fury about how The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a Christian story full of iconic Jesus-rific imagery. I don't think it's as over-the-top as some would have you believe. I'll put it this way: it's there if you want to see it.

A character betrays another. Instead of 30 pieces of silver, it's a few bites of Turkish Delight.

A character is beaten, humiliated, and then ritualistically killed at the summit of a big hill to uphold the law. He comes back to life later on and everything is hunky-dorey.

Christmas is a major holiday in Narnia.

Yes, I won't deny that all these things really smack of Christianity. I must point out that C. S. Lewis was an Englishman writing fiction intended for English children. It's no big deal for me, personally, to read a story by an Englishman that uses religious elements familiar to him. If your faith is so weak that you consider it proselytizing to see a movie where a character gives his life to save another, your DVD shelf is probably going to be pretty bare. These things can be identified as Christian. They can also be identified as good storytelling. No one went around bitching that Frank Herbert was trying to indoctrinate the world with the strong Muslim imagery so closely tied to his fighting Fremen heroes. It doesn't get any heavier than "God created [our miserable planet full of hardships and strife] to train the faithful. One can not go against the word of God". The Fremen's faith was a crucial element of the story and I liked it. It didn't make me run out and buy a prayer mat and a book about finding Mecca. Same goes for TLTWATW: seeing it isn't going to make you suddenly find yourself in Mass this Sunday (unless you were heading there anyway, I suppose). It's not going to start making Catholics doubt the Pope, although that would be hilarious. "Well, I know that Benedict XVI is looking to revoke the teaching of Limbo from Vatican doctrine, but that Lion made a really good point about where we go when we die...."

In truth, I think that those elements considered Christian in the story are what make it entertaining. To me it's not about pulling passages out of the Bible and trying to make new little Christians, it's about looking for engaging plot points and, really, exploring the human condition. If we categorically eliminated anything that could be construed as Jesus-esque from modern movies, we'd never get another movie about forgiveness, or redemption, or surviving big raging sea storms. C. S. Lewis made a very deliberate God book: Narnia is a parable of light conquering dark. You really can't get around the author's intent. And, you know, that Santa Claus thing is really hard to explain away. I chose to not approach TLTWATW as a God movie and it was still entertaining. It had a Big Bad, ugly monsters, a Charismatic Benefactor, Icicle-fu, and some good CGI battle sequences.

When we got home though, Erica and I finally figured out what it was that was bothering me about the film. It had all those elements you'd expect to find in a "good versus evil" movie. And it had nothing else but those elements. Magic transportation device? It's been done to death. A picturesque fantasy world of magic and imagination? The same. Some random boy who is prophecized to be a king? Character meets Bad Guy first and therefore believes Bad Guy implicitly for entire first half of movie despite obvious contradictory evidence? Talking animals added for comedic purposes? Dramatic river rapids escape sequence? These have all been done by Hollywood a hundred times over. How many other times has a motion picture shown you a talking wolf doing the bad guy's bidding? Or a battle sequence that involves the good guys getting reinforcements out of frickin' nowhere at that critical moment they're needed the most? Or a major character saying anything along the lines of "Stand down, men! This is something Peter needs to do on his own." TLTWATW is, ultimately, a massive clot of clichés that has somehow developed its own rudimentary storyline. It's no wonder Lewis uses Biblical imagery. He's stolen so many ideas from everything else, why not include the Good Book? Erica puts it this way: Lewis wrote a skeleton of a story that is so utterly generic that you really can't have another similar story that doesn't improve upon it in some way. I'm not going to contemplate if Lewis really stole from others or if others stole from him. It's far too late for anyone but the most diehard Lewis fans to actually suggest that Lewis created his formulaic brand of fantasy fodder before anyone else did. I'm content with my diagnosis that TLTWATW is a proto-fantasy/coming of age tale: the movie will not excite you for the same reason yesterday's newspaper doesn't excite you. No matter how grandiose the struggle for these children to triumph over evil, you've seen it before in a better movie.