This is the third Narnia movie I am watching and I think the interest level is going down by each version. This is not a very interesting situation to be in. The best face saving this has always been the lion. Aslan is very much real to the fiction.
It suits really well to the lofty designs that C L Lewis may have.
But apart from that the movie has been a disappointment. This disappointment was completely overshadowed by many firsts and achievements. The best thing about it is that two of the three kids managed to keep the three dimensional glasses on (the third one was sleeping) and watched a fair bit of movie quietly (around half an hour) before being lulled in to sleep. This is an achievement because generally they convert the movie hall in to their play ground and do quiet a bit of shouting and distracting other people. But this movie some how changed that.
The second achievement is that they really liked the part that they saw. This was the sword fight by the rat and the lion talking to the kids. They really like the majestic lion. This means that the film maker has done some thing winning here. Apart from the lion and the funny bits about the cousin turning in to a dragon, the movie was a bore. Either it does not have any thing to put OR it tried to fit too much in to a single movie.
A bit about the story line, in my opinion seven conquests is in fact a dangerous number of conquests to have in a two hour movie. It becomes one too many. So it looked like most of the swords are won without much efforts. They were just to be taken without any specific challenges. Even the last sword was actually captured and then the dilemmas started. By the way, it bodes not well on the imagination of a bunch of crew if the only thing that is most fearful to them is the huge slithery worm.
The other visuals and dilemmas also came in and went away without any context. I think the story did not do justice to the hard work put through by the graphics crew etc. The good point there was that the target audience, the kids and preschoolers could not have cared less about the story. They got what they wanted from the movie and thus it was successful.
But as I am reading the novel currently, it does not do any justice to the novel as such. I went to the movie with my parents, wife and kids plus nephew. all of them really liked it. Along with my wife who also watched her first 3-D movie with glasses on.
I tried to get her to watch the earlier three D block buster, Avatar but I had to hear about my weird choices of the movies for quiet some time since that time on. But this time it was a good family fare, not too jerky, the good won over the evil easily, which in turn was just a itsy bitsy evil at all. Put this together with good swords fights, a bit of comedy, a touch of brouhaha about human fallibility etc and we have a family entertainer right there.
I have not yet reached this part in the novel so I am not sure whether they have been very truthful to the novel. But the seven adventures looks a bit curtailed to me. I think the best way to look at these would be at least two full length feature films where the back ground is set in one movie an with first three challenges. The second movie could have contained the next four challenges and then the victory celebrations.
But for all said and done, it looked like the directors also wanted to get over this tedium of movies and go ahead to more meatier part of the stories.
I do not buy in to the talks of this being the last movie in the Narnia stories. In fact this is the part from which the lion does not figure in the stories. But the franchise is still on and I think has done enough to prepare for one more movie.
I think the next movie will definitely decide whether there is any life in the franchise at all. I think the story line and presentation will matter the most.
Thankfully my kids did not need to think about this. They were very happy playing the lion, the dragon and the rat alternately. And if the next movie also gets them to do the same, you have a winner at hands.
No comments:
Post a Comment