Buy this book from Amazon UKThe first Narnia film missed Armadillo's last deadline but is important enough to include here (the DVD will be out on 4th April, in time for Easter).
It was always goping to be difficult bringing Narnia to the screen. On the one hand the books are much loved by more than one generation of readers. On the other, they are controversial - "a meaningless jumble" (Tolkien), "detestable" (Philip Pullman) - partly because of their Christian message. And, if I'm allowed a third hand, there is also the comparison with Tolkien himself, whose Lord of the Rings has been so successfully brought to the screen by New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson.
Even avid fantasy-readers tend to be partisan and to divide along Middle Earth or Narnia lines, as Tolkien People or Lewis People. In that context, I'll admit to being one of the former. I read and adored The Lord of the Rings as it came out and still have a lurking fondness for Middle Earth and its peoples as an adult. But Narnia meant nothing to me except for unqualified admiration for the title alone of the first book to be filmed, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."
So I didn't enter the Oxford Odeon fearing the Disneyfication of a much-loved classic, more in the hope of finding a new franchise to liven up Christmas entertainment the way that Jackson did so memorably for three years. And the film is very faithful to the book.
It opens with the air-raid that finally persuades the children's mother to evacuate them to the mysterious Professor's house in the country, adding the amusing but superfluous detail that it happened "in Finchley." The country house is just as it should be, complete with magnificent wardrobe. And the new Lucy, Georgie Henley, is a stunning find, finally wiping BBC TV's orthodontically challenged tubby little bad actress from memory.
The "money" scene in which Lucy steps from the wardrobeful of fur coats out into snow-covered Narnia is absolutely perfect and worthy of the five stars Peter Breadshaw gave it in the Guardian, as is so much about this film. Tilda Swinton is a wonderful White Witch, icily sexy and untrustworthy, though it is of course the saintly Aslan who cheats on the promise made on the Deep Magic by coming back from the dead after he is sacrificed.
James McAvoy makes an excellent job of the morally ambiguous faun Mr Tumnus. The beavers are tedious, but then they are in the book. Teenage girls love William Moseley's heroic Prince Wills type Peter almost as much as they fancy the actor who played Cedric Diggory in the last Harry Potter movie.
Any representation of LWW though, stands or falls by its "L" and it was right to wait until CGI could render a convincing Aslan. This one is very good and, as voiced by Liam Neeson, has the necessary gravitas. But it all seems a bit rushed. No sooner are the children thrilled to hear that "Aslan is on the move" than we are plunged into the confrontation that leads to his sacrifice.
That is as moving as it is in the book. But the battle that follows is a tame cardboard and plastic affair compared with Helm's Deep and Pelennor Fields. And the coronation of the children shows you how unfair CS Lewis is from the beginning to Susan. We have King Peter the Magnificent, King Edmund the Just (in spite of his treachery) and Queen Lucy the Valiant but it's poor old Queen Susan the Gentle, in spite of the fact that she has used her gift of bow and arrows in the battle as corageously as anyone.(C S lewis writes in the book, "Battles are an ugly affair when women fight.") OK when it's just chaps then.
It comes back to what I always say about film adaptations: that the strengths and weaknesses of the films tend to be the strengths and weaknesses of the originals. C S Lewis had some wonderful ideas but he didn't create a coherent world - witness the bizarre and entirely faithful appearance of Father Christmas in Narnia. We have no idea what makes the White Witch evil; that's just a given, like Sauron. These Oxford professors did the world a disservice in drawing their villains without any chiaroscuro.
Disney are hoping to make all seven books and it was sensible to start with LWW even though chronologically the second story in the sequence. And it has made a convincing artificial silk purse out of the ear of a very handsome female pig. Trouble is, the rest of the herd are more common swine.
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