All praise to JEEESUS, ahem, AAAASLAN! ...

Rating: 2/10 (6 January 2006)

Had a bit of a special cinema-experience the other day; as a European visiting the US - Georgia, to be precise...
With two kids (6 and 11 yrs) of the people we were visiting, we went to see Narnia So, there I am, sitting in the Deep South, where a man is a man, and the Bible and a gun are both to be found next to the bed.
Ra-ra-ra, movie starts, at first very nice, but I was very disappointed by Narnia itself; I found it to be less than magical; very clean, and extremely dull-witted play by all kids except the smallest girl. The good guys look as if they are made out of clean plastic Lego or Playmobil parts put together by a toy-company, and the castles have the 'just out of factory - no people actually LIVE in them'-look that only big multi-nationals such as "Castles-R-Us" (a.k.a. Disney) can come up with. Where are the latrines that splatter-painted the walls of real castles in warm, earth-brown tones?
The most realistic things in Narnia were the bad guys; the minotaurs and the winged demons and orc-like creatures that actually were sweating and wearing stuff that looked real, and not like fancy-pancy plastic armour. Go Evil!! Speaking of Good vs Evil; the lowest of low points came when Aslan was resurrected; appearing with the sun-halo behind him, and music majestic and epic enough to tell even the dim-wittest person in the audience that "Go(o)d was back to kick ass!" - at this precise moment, arms shot up, hands were clapping, the word "YES!" was repeatedly yelled out with gospel-choir-like fervour, and I the word "Jeeeeeesus!" was heard yelled above it all. I should've brought my big paper bag after all.
After the movie, slowly filing out of the cinema, we passed a small guy with slick hair and a neatly ironed, white shirt. He was smiling a most benign smile, with a level of facial expression not unlike that of a playmobil figurine. He was handing out little pamphlets and postcards, with a mighty, roaring Aslan on one side, and text on the other side extolling all the Great Lion's virtues and how these were more or less analogous to those of our lord Jeeeeesus (with proper referencing to bible-passages, of course).
So, there; religion in the US today. I hope every kid in Europe will be able to watch Narnia and only marvel at the magic of it all, without having some more or less hidden religious message stuffed down their throats. Or - even better! - go and see Harry Potter and his adventures in a less-than-perfect but infinitely more interesting world instead :-)
I give it two stars; one for the best scene in the whole film: The Blitz over London in the beginning; and one for the Evil Queen desperately trying to make it more than a complete failure.