Terrible. Just terrible.

Rating: 1/10 (11 December 2005)

The latest installment of children's lit - turned movie is the weakest. The green-screen use is laughable: for example, when standing on a hilltop, next to an animal whose fur is blowing in the wind, we see a too-close shot of the children, whose improperly-lit hair is standing PERFECTLY still... on a hilltop. The CG backgrounds are not detailed and very plain (hill, trees, no movement).
Also, these children could not act, I hate to say it. Emotions, no. Excitement, no. Holding a sword like a human being, no.
The pacing was somehow both too slow AND too fast. There were plenty of dead-air moments that failed to create suspense (people in my theater were snoring, getting up a lot, getting restless), and slow-mo of poorly CG'd battle, but the storyline development (or total lack thereof) was skipped over, pushed ahead, and seemed to take a back seat to the action (as is the formula for modern CD-heavy kids movies).
The gore in the animal cruelty of sacrificing the Lion in a strangely pagan-esquire midnight ritual (I somehow didn't picture it like that as a kid reading the book) was beyond a PG depiction, (despite the cut away for the stab, and lack of blood anywhere) and gratuitous, smacking of The Passion of the Christ... but I guess that's exactly what they were going for.
I guess as long as a movie doesn't show blood, body parts, or swear words, it doesn't go over PG, despite graphic depictions of pagan sacrifice, animal abuse, creepy cyclops and other humanoids, large-scale warfare, stabbings, beatings, and such.
I'm no prude, it is a children's book -- but reading topics is less intense than seeing them graphically depicted on a big-screen, enough for maybe a 13?
The storyline is so very simple - find wonderland, set off human alarm, Savior sacrifices himself for you and resurrects, win war against evil Christmas-hating witch. 4 steps. 3 hours to tell? It just isn't as complex as LOTR or even the better Harry Potters. That's why the pacing felt so slow.
Had the characters been rounded out (one can interpret a book when making it into a movie, but nobody told Disney this) - it might have been better. If Judas, I mean Edmund, had been explored -- why was he so impudent? Did he really have fantasies of being King? Did he learn a lesson, or just go on/off from traitor to Witch-fighter? Any of these could've been explored instead of the dead-air treatment I watched.