Over-hyped

Rating: 4/10 (30 December 2005)

I'm fresh back from having seen Narnia on the biggest possible screen. I knew better than to have great expectations, so I was only slightly disappointed. The story is very straightforward - you know where it's going, and it just keeps on going there and going there. The book is too compressed here; events happen too fast and there's no real time for developing the characters.
In the final analysis this Narnia movie is just a run-of-the-mill Hollywood production of a story that was and is a far better fit for the small screen as a TV series. Also, a big-budget production like this pretty much had carte blanche with the creation of the fantasy world of Narnia, and still they couldn't come up with anything particularly imaginative. This movie reads far too much like what it is, but shouldn't exclusively be: a kids' movie.
4 out of 10.