This afternoon I abandoned my remaining schoolwork (not much at this point in the end-0f-semester flow, but still) and hied myself to a nearby moviehouse to take in the brand new Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third installment in Walden Media’s Narnia series. Normally as you know I don’t write movie reviews (although it has been suggested that I start), but this one is going to take some processing on my part so I thought I might as well inflict it on you. OH how lucky you are.
Caution: Ahead lie spoilers. Possibly LOTS of spoilers.
So. If I were someone who really loved all the Harry Potter movies and liked the Lightning Thief movie a lot AND had not read the Narnia books, I might have really enjoyed Dawn Treader. It’s shiny and fun and has lots of Exciting Adventure and Action. It also has the ever-more endearing Georgie Henley as Lucy, the ever-more broodingly handsome Skandar Keynes as Edmund, and the ever-more dreamy Ben Barnes as Caspian (although he is starting to look like a finer-featured Keanu Reeves). Will Poulter, the newcomer who plays Eustace Scrubb, is awfully good as the Pevensies’ priggish cousin.
But casting has, I think, never been one of the problems in the Narnia movies. What bothers me is the changes that the writers have been weaving into their adaptations. In Prince Caspian, the second Narnia movie, they turned the Battle of Aslan’s How into the giant centerpiece of the film, and took out a lot of the smaller pieces of story before and after. This was annoying, but I could at least sortof understand WHY they would do it.
SOME SPOILERS COMING NOW.
Not so the changes in Dawn Treader. We didn’t need to have Lucy being so inflamed with jealousy about Susan. We didn’t need quite so much of the White Witch (please leave us alone now, even though we really can’t get enough of Tilda Swinton). We didn’t need a purely gratuitous Lucy-as-Susan-in-a-World-Without-Lucy dream just so we get to see that Anna Popplewell, who plays Susan, still looks much as she always has, while William Moseley, who plays eldest brother Peter, has taken an odd Windsor turn and from some angles is completely unrecognizable. Those are small quibbles though.
BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR SPOILERS HERE, FOR REAL:
There are two big things that the writers have done which neither streamline nor improve the original story, and these two things happen to advance the purpose of a third big thing, really a gigantic thing, that is completely stupid.
The first is the addition of a man and his daughter who join the Dawn Treader on the slave-trading island to go and rescue their wife/mother, who has been given as a sacrifice to a weird green mist thing (the fact that this is not the gigantic thing may have you worried). We don’t need the man and his daughter; the only thing they do is give us the weird green mist thing, plus a chance for Lucy to go all Girl Power at the daughter (lesson: I, Lucy, don’t have to be Susan to be pretty, and you, Gail, don’t have to be me to be awesome!). Do we need the green mist thing? Read on!
The second is the dramatic alteration of Eustace’s dragon adventure. In the book, he becomes a dragon because he’s greedy (as in the film), but he learns to be useful and pleasant, and then Aslan shows him how to become himself again. His redemption is slow but reasonable. In the film, he becomes a dragon because he’s greedy, but then he remains a dragon so that he can pull the ship through still waters. Really. Also, though, he fights the sea serpent! Then, wounded by the fight with the serpent and a misunderstanding with a crazy person, Eustace flies sadly off to die, but Aslan puts him through an oddly Phoenix-like rebirth. Redeemed and reborn, Eustace is the vehicle for the great big problem I had with the movie.
Which is:
In the book, Caspian is sailing off to the East because a) he has tasked himself with finding and saving (if possible) the lost lords who left Narnia because of his evil uncle, and b) he is bored and young and wants an adventure.
In the movie, Caspian is sailing off to the East because he needs to go find the lost lords. But then he is charged with SAVING ALL OF NARNIA FROM AN EVIL SPELL (the green mist, of course) BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE ZOMG. If he vanquishes the evil green mist, all the Narnians from the Lone Islands who have been sacrificed to said mist will be FREE (weirdly, they are all just sitting there in their little boats the whole time, waiting for rescue). In order to STOP THE EVIL, he needs to gather the seven swords of the seven lords and place them all at Aslan’s Table, on the Island of Ramadu. It is in the process of searching out the seventh sword that they find the Dark Island, in which the sea serpent AND the evil green mist live. If Eustace is not a) a dragon, b) wounded at the Dark Island during the fight with the sea serpent by means of the seventh sword, which is then stuck in his arm, and c) salvaged by Aslan on the shores of Ramadu’s island, he cannot possibly get the sword to the table before EVIL WINS.
Are the changes effective? I don’t think so. I found them intrusive and annoying, especially this focus on Saving Narnia from Evil. The book had plenty of adventure, and does not need this weird “OMG Harry Potter has to fight evil, so we’d better get with the program” problem.
More, though, I found this episode much more pastel-colored Jesus-y than the others. This lingers throughout the whole film, but the Carrie Underwood song over the final credits (about how we will find a Kingdom where we will Belong) was the icing on that particularly sticky cake.
I guess this is more a long complaint than a review. I don’t know how I feel about that. My issue is that Dawn Treader is my favorite of the Narnia books, not least because of the long redemption of Eustace (which says a lot more about wanting to belong than a Carrie Underwood song ever will), and this movie does not match what I need from the story.
It’s pretty, and the 3D works reasonably well (I hate 3D, because it makes me feel like rabid weasels are being shoved into my eyes, but…). The casting continues not to fail. And really, if I had not known what I wanted out of it, I probably would have liked it quite a bit. Under the circumstances, though… Yeah. Not so much.
