Not as good as it thinks it is

Rating: 3/10 (8 December 2005)

I'm not going to go over the ground so many of the other comments have made, although several of the comments frankly baffle me. Tilda Swinton was great as the ice-cold Machiavellian ruler, but fell far short believably beguiling Edmund. Why he should have considered trusting such an obviously ill-intentioned character was incomprehensible, and I put this down to her simply not understanding what her character was up to. I read the book the best part of 30 years ago and recall her being sweet and enticing rather than simply ordering him to betray his siblings. (Surely, being just a little older than myself, she read the books as a child? They were all the rage in the late 60s with younger kids, as LOTR was with older ones.) My other big gripe is with the SFX. Did I really see the same film as the one those who praised the CGI, the landscapes and the animals? A significant amount of the blue/green screen work looked cheap and unfinished - it may have passed muster 10 years ago, but not today! I've never been a fan of anthropomorphous animals (except for the occasional cartoon), but with the possible exception of the beavers, the sounds being made did not believably emanate from the animals' mouths. I found this particularly weird given Adamson's experience with CGI animation.
Of course, many of the reviews here (and elsewhere) have compared this movie to the LOTR trilogy or the Potter franchise: Disney probably doesn't discourage such comparisons, if they're favourable. Regrettably, in my mind, such favourable comparisons are misplaced: LOTR's scope and geography beats Narnia into a cocked hat, and the mass battles of Jackson's trilogy have set a very high benchmark; Narnia doesn't come close with its battle, which I couldn't even call "eye candy". Potter is a very different animal, the continuing storyline being its main attraction, and characterisation built over the series as the trainee witches and wizards mature. Attempting to show such growth in the limited running time of a single movie was always going to be difficult, and given even my foggy recollection of the book, much development was lost at the expense of under-whelming visuals.
A fairly crude measure of my enjoyment of a film is how long into it I am desperate for a break and how often I need to check my watch, and by that measure, this film fails rather spectacularly, as I lasted no more than half an hour before my attention wavered. LOTR and all but the first Potter movie came off admirably in comparison, but even that did better than this piece of over-hyped bandwagon-jumping.