Decent movie from a mediocre book

Rating: 3/10 (10 December 2005)

The realization of Narnia is fairly impressive. Landscapes are portrayed nicely, and the scope of the world is felt. However certain areas (mostly the witches castle and dungeon) are so obviously artificial you want them to hurry up to the next scene, before you're pulled out of the fantasy world completely. The best moments in the film, come from Lucy's first venture into Narnia. Her encounter with Mr. Tumnus is well done and when he enchants her with his flute, the scene is fairly creepy. His turnaround is nicely portrayed and he stands out as one of the better actors in the movie. Despite the wonder of disappearing in and out of the wardrobe, you start to wish they'd go in for good and start the adventure. Mostly because it's tough to watch Peter and Susan act without any wolves or lions to distract you from their melodramatic expressions. Once in Narnia, the film begins to take off and is only slowed down in a few scenes that are unnecessary. THese scenes are not in the book and are the filmmaker's attempt to try to flesh out more story. However there are already places in the book that shouldn't be there, so adding more scenes doesn't help. The adventure is fairly face paced. Once meeting some well rendered beavers, they are attacked by fiersome wolves. THe wolf captain proves to be the scariest villain of the movie and offers some of the best CGI in the movie. (The witch might have been scarier if her hair wasn't gelled back like she was just riding a motorcycle, and she didn't have to cope with that stupid crown.) Anyhow the story goes along with the children meeting Aslan. Probably the best computer generated character since Gollum. Aslan gets a nice chunk of screen time and he seems more than capable of defeating any witch. I guess thats kind of the whole problem. Aslan was gone and now he's back. He brings with him spring, a huge army and brings back animals that were turned into stone. So who needs the kids? All they do is mess things up enough to get Aslan killed. (But that doesn't matter because he is reincarnated.And yes that is kind of like Jesus)Peter really doesn't do much. Sure he fights the witch, (with swordfighting abilities we never knew he had) but it's Aslan who get her in the end.