In a nutshell, I would say the movie was... Just OK'ish.

Rating: 6/10 (4 December 2005)

In a nutshell, I would say the movie was... Just OK'ish. As a huge fan of "The Lord of the Rings" and the "Potter" films, an epic fantasy movie such as this should have blown my socks off, but it just didn't seem to have any heart.
The movie starts in World War II England. Four kids are sent out in to the countryside to live away from the main brunt of the German bombing campaign. The children are quite bored, and they decide to play a game of hide and seek. When the youngest attempts to hide in an old wardrobe, she enters a mystic wintry world of Narnia. A land full of half animal, as well as fully animal creatures who can chat it up, as well as cyclops, and other various creatures we expect to find in such tales of fantasy.
Tilda Swinton does a quite competent job as the wicked white witch. Well, lets face it, just watching her beautiful face would be enough entertainment to half carry a movie. In fact, all of the acting is quite solid in my opinion. Also, the effects of the show are quite masterful, a job well done by all on that front. Where the movie comes up missing is how it uses all of the wonderful attributes it has. These are wonderful and magical images, yet we never really care that much about either the children or the entire world of Narnia. Sure, they seem nice enough, and the White Witch seems quite evil, but we never seem to get into the characters outside of rather shallow characterizations of good and bad. Its as if Disney tried to make a Lord of the Rings film. They kept all of the imagery and the structure, but they forgot the heart.
Now, I must confess. I nave never read the books myself, but even if they also never really let the reader get into the characters, I still blame the film makers, whose job it is to go beyond the source material and make a truly entertaining film for its viewers. I am unsure if the writers and directors were just not competent to this task, or if they truly felt like all they had to do is give us a few funny and cute lines of dialogue for us to understand why these human children decide to risk all to help them, or conversely why all of the "good" creatures of Narnia are willing to die in combat under the leadership of some seemingly random humans.
Another sadly missed opportunity was the final somewhat anti-climatic battle. While the first half of the movie is unforgivably slow to build towards some action scenes, the war itself involves a good idea of creatures running at each other, but rarely do we get to see any actual combat, or even contact between combatants! My mind was a wonder at the thought of a cheetah, rhino and centaur good guys duping it out with various half bull, cyclops or bat people. But, none of this is actually seen. Instead we get to see a lot of heroic poses and grunts from a multitude of admittedly wonderful looking mythical creatures. But, as I said, without gaining an investment in any of the actual beings we are watching, these poses come off as images some CGI technician thought would look good.
The ultimate realization of image over substance and hopefully not a hint of things to come in fantasy film. With that being said, I am sure it will make tons and tons of money considering the marketing megamachinery behind it connecting it to the recently very popular "Christianity in film" trend. But, it will never truly take the place of our beloved Lord of the Rings franchise.