A fantasy world that is not so dark and dismal

Rating: 9/10 (12 December 2005)

I entered the theater a little worried. I began reading CS Lewis when I was 12 and I had already read the first book to my 6 year old daughter so the cat was out of the bag on Christian morality in our world of myths of legends (as well as a good dose of pagan nature worship). But I was unsettled by some of the reports on the news about how the Christian right had been targeted by Disney for this film and that it managed to get a PG rating (putting it somewhere in between "Because of Win Dixie" and "Racing Stripes"). So, I feared that my beloved books would be zealously Chistianized for the sake of the massive Evangelical movement in this country and its many many dollars. To my delight, I found the same wonderful level of Chistian sentiment in the film that are in the books. Nothing offensive (to me at least), no dogma, no lectures, no secret Jesus messages beyond the original ones that Lewis included. And as I breathed a sigh of relief that this wasn't another "Vegi-Tales" the film washed over me like a bath of fantasy come to life. The mythical creatures were delightful and the world of Narnia was worth saving. And I loved Lucy (but I never felt much for Peter or Susan, not in the film, not in the books).
After having watched The Lord of the Rings many times and even the Harry Potter films way more than I needed to I was beginning to grow weary of the fantasy world that was once wonderful, now a dark and forbidding place filled with evil. Peter Jackson's love affair with Orcs, demons and the Dark Lord is forgivable (because Tolkien was obsessed with it too, although Tolkien also created a Middle Earth that was so beautiful and ancient and amazing that you wanted to go there, to live there, but who would really want to live in Jackson's Middle Earth, full of ghosts and loneliness and decay). But Narnia managed to have the villainy without creating a hopeless world of darkness. Again, it felt like the books. And I didn't miss the blood and the slime that Narnia could have had. For me it was a real success.
Now, let's hope that they are quickly shooting the next few books so that they can catch these kids before they get too old.