Katie and Joseph saw this yesterday. They both liked it. I confess to little interest – I read the books when I was twelve, and again to my older children ages ago (Joseph is just about ready to start on his own, perhaps), and the whole Lewis/Tolkein fictional opus has never had any pull on me. I had to force myself to reading the Fellowship just so I could have some sort of reference point in discussions. Just not my thing.
But anyway…here are some links to varied views of the film, released this weekend:
Thomas Hibbs
The real problem with the film, I’m saddened to report, has to do with Aslan. This is due in part to the book’s relegation of him to a more marginal role than he had in the first book. On screen, he seems almost like one of the other animals — more powerful, certainly, but not all that mysterious. Except for when he roars, he is more cuddly than fearful. His admonitions to Lucy about the importance of fidelity to him come off as formulaic. A sign of the extent to which Aslan has been diminished in the film is evident in the penultimate scene, in which the children depart Narnia. In the book, they say goodbye to everyone else and then, last, “wonderfully and terribly,” as Lewis puts it, “it was farewell to Aslan himself.”
By contrast, in the film, the parting culminates with Susan’s sorrow over leaving Caspian. The scene is sweet and innocent enough, but it cultivates in the audience the mundane sense of unrealized romantic possibility, rather than the grand appreciation, both terrible and wonderful, of a cosmic romance of redemption.
While Tolkien’s works are vast and grave, Lewis’s Narnia stories feel unaffected, sympathetic, homey. If in The Lord of the Rings someone is always swinging an axe at the head of a monster, in The Chronicles of Narnia he is getting out of the rain, warming up by the fire, and having some tea and biscuits. I think that Lewis had a better knack for storytelling than Tolkien did; I recorded the Narnia books as well, and could feel the difference.
But as charming as the Narnia stories are, the movies give them more body, more strength. That’s especially true with this latest, Prince Caspian. One of my correspondents, Stuart Koehl, sketches out a theory:
In many ways, Caspian is the weakest of the Narnia books, showing the effect of hurried composition, imperfect familiarity with the characters, and the need to present a message about the role of Christians in a time of war (it was a propaganda as well as an apologetic piece). A screenwriter would have the whole Narnia corpus in front of him, and knowing the mythology from beginning to end, could remove inconsistencies and sand down the rough edges.
This is a movie about what happens when you leave faith behind and think it is just a childish thing. It’s a film about how such necessary belief is often replaced by darkness and sin represented by pride and vainglory. None of the secular reviews can mention this, but it is striking how much of St. Paul is in this film. Remember in First Corinthians when he says, “When I was a child, I talked like a child…When I became a man, I put childish things aside.” His childish things were pride and jealousy and anger. He points out clearly that faith, hope and love are needed if one wants to become truly an adult. We will never see God clearly here, says St. Paul, but if we believe, we’ll see enough to know that God is by our side. Kudos to Adamson for constructing the Aslan sequences to make this point crystal clear. To really see, one has to believe.
Jeffrey Overstreet
Steven Greydanus
In addition, Jeffrey has pulled together a post centered on exploring if and how the film stripped the book of meaning
Fr. Dwight Longenecker on why he likes Tolkein better, anyway.
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