Posted on 12/10/2010 2:02:46 PM PST by paudio
Before this film, I think the cinematic Narnia series was a little like Lucy, looking enviously at big-sister Susan. Maybe it was trying too hard to be the next Lord of the Rings or aspire to Harry Potter-level success. It worked so hard to be literary and spectacular that, just maybe, it forgot what the Narnia books were at their core: children's stories. Meaningful stories, yes. Good stories, absolutely, filled with allegorical heft and layers of meaning … but at their core, they're meant to be fun.
Dawn Treader found the fun. For two hours, I was engrossed in a land I loved as a child and still love today. I was called into a magical world and I once again felt Aslan tugging at my heart. He wasn't in my backyard, but it was the next best thing.
(Excerpt) Read more at pluggedin.com ...
Dawn Treader and The Last Battle were mine. Hard to chose between them.
You know, you can always invite him out for dinner and the film. My older kids love being taken out by the parenti.
Bookmark bump.
No—Amish.
Oh, silly me, of course. That’s why they have those curly-toed shoes.
I like The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Magician’s Nephew. I’m hoping they’ll film the latter.
The Silver Chair and The Last Battle were a little creepy.
I plan to see it this week.
My only pet peeve was that they entirely ommitted the scene from the book where Ramandu himself verbally slaps down Eustance over the essence of being.
My girlfriend absolutely loved it.
The Silver Chair I’ve read twice and was a bit confused in spots. The Last Battle was also hard in places, but the resolution seemed to be for the best and it seemed to really “stretch” my thinking in a good way.
This movie is a rare gem. So many directors attempt to transport their audience to another dimension—including previous Narnia directors—but never let you escape their storyboard for more than a few seconds (I’m sighing about you, Steven Spielberg).
But in Dawn Treader, Apted opened the doors to a sense of “otherness” that truly baptizes the imagination with a sense of longing. In spite of some standard Hollywood tricks—including the superfluous use of 3D—C.S. Lewis would have been happy about that. Rarely have I been so moved by a fantasy film.
Please don’t go in wanting an action story. This flick has a lot to contemplate. It will be a box office bomb only because, like Eustace Clarence Scrubb’s dragon hide, we’ve got a decade of lousy “entertainment” to scrape off our SFX-hardened imagination. Thank goodness, however, Apted understands the amazing effect of amazing grace.
If it bombs, that’s solely because Fox doesn’t seem to put much efforts in promoting the movie. Practically no TV commercials, and scattered publicity.
Unfortunately, the only "other" studios care about is what focus groups say--see Apted's interview.
C.S. Lewis’ trilogy would be great.
It was the evil guys worshiping the corpse head. Or heads. They were evil. The did bad things.
I watched the movie last night. A beautifully done, although I thought it might be even better if they allow more than 2 hrs rather than the current version. Pleasantly surprised to see the cinema was full, even though it’s evening screening.
On the other hand, most of the themes of the book are there and it's about the best one could do short of expanding it out to 2 1/2 or 3 hours.
If you enjoyed the first two movies then this will not dissapoint and is in fact possibly the best of the series so far.
Saw it in 3D, which I thought was very nicely understated except in a few spots and contributes very nicely to the complete "other worldness" that others have commented on above.
Ok, Just got back from the theatre and ready to share my thoughts (do I need to say “spoiler”).
Of the three, this film deviates most from its source material. I was expecting that; and in itself it doesn’t bother me. They wanted to give the story more of a dramatic arc to make it work as a movie rather than a book. Given that there would be deviations, how did they do? Well, they did a good job of re-ordering the events so that they fit the new plotline, while for the most part staying true to their original intent.
One issue that I find fault with is that they seem to be too action oriented. A great deal of effort was put into choreographing the elaborate battle sequences, I wish the non-action scenes had been given similar attention. Case in point: Eustace’s transformation back into a human. It almost seemed like an afterthought the way it was hurriedly sandwiched between two action segments - not even counting that they’re truncating a fan favorite, at the same time they were ruining the dramatic impact. It was odd that they then drug out the epilogue on the border to Aslan’s country.
So while overall, they did a fairly good job of adapting the book to film; in the end they somewhat fail. With a bit more care they could have produced a great movie, but as is they end up with only a good one.
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