Frequent commenter Bruce Moomaw offers the following Narnia review:
The movie is quite good, although not great. It’s not absolutely top-notch children’s entertainment, because — and only because — the book itself isn’t quite at the top rank; it is, after all, an allegory of the Gospels, and Lewis was always better when he was telling his own religious stories about the different kinds of moral trials and temptations that we can undergo (on which he was seemingly incapable of writing a dull word). The remaining Narnia books, save the last one, are all his own invention.
The biggest news is that neither the non-Christians who feared that the movie would be a heavy-handed piece of bigoted Christian propaganda, nor the Christians who feared that the story would be secularized into unrecognizability, have anything to fear. The movie follows the book almost perfectly — I can’t think of another movie that has followed its book so closely — and the result is that it is unmistakably Christian but not heavy-handed or bigoted, for the simple reason that Lewis himself was a Christian but not a religious bigot. His portrayal of the true nature of morality is one that both Christians and non-Christians can agree on totally.
In this connection, let me add that I remain mystified by the fact that Lewis’ most venomous enemies (including Philip Pullman) have apparently never read anything he said or wrote in his life EXCEPT the Narnia books — which they insist on grotesquely misinterpreting. The man was not a religious bigot, not a racist, and not a misogynist (some of his earlier writings show some mild misunderstanding of the psyches of women, but that
disappeared totally by the 1950s and was never serious). Where homosexuality is concerned, his views were amazingly tolerant for someone in the first half of the 20th century: “I have never understood how any sexually normal person can view homosexuality with anything other than a kind of bewildered pity.” (In one chapter of his autobiography dealing with his years in a brutal private school, he notes the large number of gay relationships between the boys there — and then adds that they were the one sign of human affection he saw there.)In the end, Lewis was simply too morally sane to be a bigot on any subject. He wasn’t even very politically conservative — he was a moderate conservative with the emphasis on the “moderate” part, which is why his admirers have included everyone from Bill Buckley to Kenneth Tynan (who had some of Lewis’ lines read at his own funeral), and which sometimes got him in hot water with Tolkien. Anyone who doubts this about Lewis is free to read, say, “The Four Loves”, or his poems and letters — and anyone who regards him as a religious bigot can read almost anything he ever wrote for clear proof that he absolutely detested it. (In the first chapter of the first book he wrote after his complex adult conversion back to Christianity, “The Pilgrim’s Regress”, our hero John abandons Christianity as a boy because of the way it was presented to him in his homeland of Puritania: “The upshot appeared to be that the Landlord [God] was extraordinarily kind and good to his tenants, and would most certainly torture them all to death the moment he got the slightest excuse for doing so.” In Lewis’ view, Hell is a state of misery that mortals impose entirely on themselves, through selfishness and cold pride.) I myself never quite followed him all the way into Christianity, for complex reasons that I won’t go into here — but it’s an understatement to say that he changed my life for the better at age 15; I recommend his works for adults unreservedly.
The movie does some little things wrong, which you’ll notice. Most seriously, Susan (Anna Popplewell) is bad-tempered and grumpy through most of the movie, and it isn’t made adequately clear that this is because she’s driven by fear. But it does all the big things right: Liam Neeson as Aslan’s voice (that is, the voice of Christ himself), which is warm and authoritative rather than pompous; Tilda Swinton as the White Witch, who is
(literally) chilling rather than over-the-top melodramatic — she convincingly portrays a person purged of every last speck of affection or human feeling — and, most remarkably, the movie somehow manages to make it believable that in this world these four kids could be valuable warriors. (As an added fringe benefit, it features the only non greed-oriented depiction of Santa Claus I’ve ever seen, which I would have thought
impossible.) And, my God, computerized animation simply goes on getting better and better. We have finally achieved cinema’s long-sought promised land: we can now portray on film, absolutely convincingly, any scene that a fantasy writer can ever imagine.The reason the movie gets the big things right was instantly clear when I saw the opening credits: the executive producer of the Narnia movies is one other than Douglas Gresham, Lewis’ stepson, who made it clear in his autobiography that he both liked and understood Lewis very well. In short, these movies are being made by someone who genuinely cares about the sourcematerial. And if all the remaining Narnia books are filmed, and filmed faithfully, I look forward with delicious anticipation to the reaction to the last one — in which Aslan says flatly that even self-declared Satanists will go to Heaven if they do kind and generous things in the name of Satan because they are actually worshipping Christ and just calling him “Satan”; whereas even self-proclaimed Christians will NOT go to Heaven if they are selfish or cruel, because they are actually worshipping Satan and calling him “Christ”. You can’t possibly state a more ecumenical version of Christianity than that. Now sit back for a moment and imagine the reaction of the “Left Behind” gang to it..
Sounds like a good movie…
Geek, Esq.
Watered-down Lord of the Rings.
waddayaknow
It is a wonderful movie. It seems to be somewhat more edited for time/content than the earlier BBC series appeared to be, however the faithfulness to the spirit and text of Lewis’ writings is wonderful. Let it be known that I have read the entire Narnia collection at least ten times or more and read them straight to my children as bed times stories at least twice (doing all the characters/voices as a part of the fun). Please do yourself a favor, believer or not, for your heart, mind, and soul will benefit.
waddayaknow
…read straight through…
MattM
That was about a movie?
cd6
I hope I speak for a large majority of the population when I say “what the fuck.”
I read a few of these books back when I was little (not them all, because I don’t think our library had the complete set, and they got kind of repetitive/boring, ie Narnia’s in trouble again, kids go save it. Also note: I therefore never got to read the last one, which is just straight up judgement day, which drives the point home in a more forceful manner than any of the other books)
As a kid, I NEVER put the biblical connection together, cause it wasnt quite in your face enough. It treads that line between “this is just like Jesus/God” and “its all fairy tale magic.” Of course, nobody presented it to me as a biblical allegory (rather, thats how the bible was presented to me)
Therefore, when this movie came out, and there was all this relgious talk, I totally didn’t understand why. And I saw the movie and began thinking, ok I can buy the lion as Jesus, but then who do the kids represent? Christians? Who are the (notably ugly) Witch’s army supposed to represent? Non-Christians? Sinners? And is the moral “make war on non-christians”?
As a movie, I would give it like a 6/10. It was clearly made for kids, as the plot was straightfoward, and the kid actors didn’t blow me away. The special effects were nice, but it was hardly a fantastic movie. King Kong, which I also saw this weekend, was better, though long. The problem is, if I go online somewhere saying KK was better, people will slam me for not embracing the religously themed movie. bahhhhhh. The review you posted above focuses on the author’s stances on issues and so on, but the problem is, how many people who see the movie have any idea what the author thought about God? Moreoever, how many care? I’d wager, its not as high as movie reviewers in the blogosphere seem to think it is.
jaime
“I love this movie like McAdams loves Gossling.”
HAHAHAHAHAH.
texas dem
I read each of those seven books ten times or more when I was a kid. And, that’s a weird exception in my life and mostly cause no one around me knew to give me any Tolkien or Herbert once I was done with the Narnia books. I’m not a fanatic about those or any other books in particular, so this isn’t one of those diehard-weirdo-hates-the-movie reviews.
Anyway, I didn’t think the movie was very good. It completely failed to take all of the critical dramatic moments over the edge from “decent” to “great.” It was kind of choppy. It didn’t make good use of transitions as a time to zoom out and give context or sense of beauty or mood. I hadn’t noticed the failure to give any depth of character to Susan, but that’s typical of the movie: flat, rushed, and without a strong artistic vision applied throughout. It wasn’t very mystical-magical feeling, among other things.
They did characterize Edmund pretty well. And they cast the faun Tumnus well too, although the scene in his house is scattered. That’s about it for praise.
They didn’t over or underdo the religion… but they did underdo everything else. And oh yeah… a couple of the elements just looked cheap. The faun’s ears, the forest around the lamppost, the lack of PeterJackson style broad landscape shots (the whole movie is close in, with few vistas)… maybe they just needed a better budget. And director, and caster, and costumes, and animator…
Gary Farber
“The remaining Narnia books, save the last one, are all his own invention.”
If Bruce is trying to say that Christian allegory is dropped from the remaining books, he’s flat wrong. This is hardly just my opinion; we have decades of scholarship on this (beyond it being obvious; I was 7-8, but didn’t realize the allegory until the second or third book, and then slapped myself upside the head. If he’s not trying to say that, I have no idea what he’s trying to say, I’m afraid.
“…simple reason that Lewis himself was a Christian but not a religious bigot….”
What tosh. Everyone knows that C. S. Lewis is an infamous Satanist pagan. To quote a taste:
But everyone knows this stuff. Still, check out the site I linked to; riches untold, indeed.
Mr.Ortiz
The definitive review is right here. For anyone not familiar with decentfilms.com, it’s a movie review site run by a religious scholar who knows his shit when it comes to film. His degree comes in especially handy for movies with strong religious themes, and he nails this one to the … well, you get the idea.
merelycurious
Let me just say I almost walked out on this movie.
And not because of any christian overtones/symbolism (the comment in the review “unmistakably Christian” is wishful thinking in my opinon). The christian symbolism is barely noticible – you have to look for it. You could just as easily argue it was based on Buddhism or even the teachings of muhammad if you wanted to be argumentative. (which I don’t)
Just a bad movie (acting, plotting, story, dialog)
I’m astounded by the claims that people actually enjoyed the movie.
to each their own, my 2 cents
Zifnab
I enjoyed it as a guy who reads lots of fantasy novels (and hates when he sees them get butchered at the box office), I enjoyed it as an infrequent movie-goer, and I enjoyed it as a devotely uncertain agnostic. All in all, it was a great movie and totally worth the $6-$8 to see it.
Bruce Moomaw
So John actually ran that entire gargantuan review of mine? My God. To steal a line from the Joker, I take back almost every nasty thing I’ve ever said about him.
Looks like about half of you liked it. There’s no point in making it into “Citizen Kane” — but I kept waiting for it to make a slip in either of the directions I mentioned (tub-thumping bigoted Christianity or watered-down nebulosity), and it never did.
As for Gary Farber’s comment: well, of course all the remainder of the books are crammed with “Christian allegory” — but that’s entirely different from saying that they retell a specific Biblical story in allegorical form. Lewis had a damned powerful and inventive imagination, and just about all of his Christian writings reflect that — as Kenneth Tynan said, even if you disagreed with him about something you could count on him to shed some kind of interesting light on it. It would be more accurate to say that the middle five books are crammed with “moral” allegory, because you can go through those books with a fine-toothed comb without finding any kind of moral or philosophical view expressed in them that any non-Christian except an Ayn Randian could disagree with.
The late SF and fantasy critic Baird Searles said that he regarded the first book as the weakest — “cute rather than convincing” — and the last one, an allegorical retelling of the Book of Revelations, is certainly the other weakest one. Lewis, however, even managed to represent that quease-inducing story in a morally wholesome way — and it ends with that wonderful exchange I mentioned. It will be, at any rate, interesting to see how the other movies turn out.
P.S. to Texas Dem: Mr. Tumnus’ ears are one of those other “little slips” I mentioned. (If you want one of the more serious ones, Aslan’s resurrection scene doesn’t have as much pop as in the book, although I thought the sacrifice itself was very well handled.) Also, how in the name of God did somebody naked and with no hair on his chest manage to keep from freezing to death in the Narnian winter? But I thought that three of the kids were very well played. The trouble with Susan is not that she lacks “depth of character”, but that it’s the WRONG character — she actually comes across as more unpleasant and skeptical than Edmund.
To MattM: no, I wasn’t just writing about the movie as a movie — but that’s because Lewis’ enemies have also been determined not to write about his Narnia books (or, in Polly Toynbee’s case, the movie) without also trying furiously to muddy Lewis himself up as a Vile Religious Bigot. For me, them’s fightin’ words. Now, when it comes to Tolkien, the accusation, unfortunately, would carry some weight — when Lewis wrote a 1939 poem savagely attacking Roy Campbell for his pro-Franco sympathies, JRRT jumped all over him because Franco was pro-Catholic and therefore MUST be a good guy. (But then, Edgar Allan Poe was a vicious racist.)
And finally, yeah, “King Kong” is the next movie I intend to see. (Three days ago I was in a supermarket checkout line where the magazine rack displayed Newsweek with Bush on the cover, just above Entertainment Weekly with Kong on the cover. You get one guess as to which one looked decidedly more intelligent.)
Gary Farber
“…but that’s entirely different from saying that they retell a specific Biblical story in allegorical form.”
Ah, gotcha. Now, if you’d said that in the first place…. ;-)
“The late SF and fantasy critic Baird Searles”
The Original Science Fiction Shop, when he and Martin opened it in NYC (circa 1971), was one of the great joys of my young life. I used to chat with Bai every week or two. Then I ended up appearing on the sf radio show he foundd, Hour of The Wolf, though under his successor, my old pal Jim Freund, a number of times (the show is still going on WBAI, NYC; there’s a web page, of course, and streaming).
Bruce, if you google on my site for “c. s. lewis,” you’ll find about a dozen posts in recent times (the search engine on my sidebar is broken; I intend to fix or replace it, but it’s not near the top of the priority list.)
Slartibartfast
Saw it, knew what to expect, and liked it. It was a little too violent for my comfort to have my four-year-old watch (although only in a few places), but overall it was just about what one would expect who has a) read the books a number of times, b) understood them, c) has seen a movie anytime in the last couple of years that has any decent CGI in it, d) realizes that not even the most gifted director is going to make this story a barnburner without rewriting it at least a little, and e) goes into it with the knowledge that this is geared to adolescents, pretty much. Complaints of it not being a wonderful, deep, exciting movie for adults to watch I’d put in the same receptacle as the reviews panning a remake of Black Beauty, if and when that happens.
In short, if you’re going to have a Narnia movie, this is far and away the best one to own.
tzs
I just read the review Mr. Ortiz references above and it sounds like if you know the book at all, they dropped a lot of the really good parts of the dialog….still think I’ll see the movie.
Read the books as a kid, still enjoy them. The christian symbolism never bothered me because it falls in line with a very long literary tradition of allegory (and I loved the ecumenical aspects–there’s no question in Narnia but that pagan and Christian gods can exist peacefully side by side).
What I appreciate about C.S. Lewis is the impression I get he really thought deeply about what Christianity was and what it meant. And the Screwtape Letters are simply hilarious.
I’d also recommend his book “Surprised by Joy”, about his relationship with his wife. Lewis’s ideas about women definitely changed over time.
wheels
No comments about Narnia, because I haven’t seen it yet, but the movie that I think comes closest to the book is “The Maltese Falcon.” The only divergence I can think of is the character of Sam Spade – Humphrey Bogart doesn’t fit the description of the character as looking like “a blond Satan.”