Whose Christianity?

Rating: 9/10 (10 December 2005)

It has been a long time since I found a fantasy film with a lot of special effects so satisfying as "Narnia." It is exquisitely crafted, visually gorgeous, has some fine performances, and itlike the underlying materialis more challenging than Harry Potter and more interesting than Tolkien.
There is huge irony and hypocrisy to the embrace of "Narnia" by the same conservative Christians who would burn Harry Potter at the stake for witchcraft. The free mixture of some Christian symbolism with the CelticPaganfairy world ought to offend them just as much. Doing a talking lion to death on a Druid altar and then bringing him back to life is not the same thing as the resurrection, after all. By their lights, that fairy world is demonic, and the premise is abominable heresy. It would seem that fundamentalist Christians embrace C.S. Lewis because doing so is good for wedge-issue politics.
I'm afraid that backlash from the studio's misrepresentation of "Narnia" as some sort of bitter, right-wing medicine like "The Passion of the Christ" will deny it some of the popular success it deserves.