very good realisation of a splendid book

Rating: 9/10 (11 December 2005)

17 years after the first attempt to translate The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe into a live action film comes this big screen treat from Andrew Adamson, previously best known for Shrek.
CS Lewis' book deals with four children, evacuated during WWII to the home of Professor Kirke (Jim Broadbent), who find a magical world inside a wardrobe in a stately home. This new world is populated by mythical creatures (fauns, centaurs, satyrs, and dwarfs) and talking animals, and is ruled by Aslan, a Christ-like figure in the person of a talking lion.
Narnia is in the grip of the White Witch, the self-styled Queen Jadis (played by Tilda Swinton). Curiously if all 7 books are to be filmed the story of how Jadis came to be in Narnia has been missed out (this is told in book 1, The Magician's Nephew, although The Lion... was written first). It is always winter and never Christmas, and there is a mysterious prophecy that states that the White Witch will lose her power when two boys and two girls sit on the thrones of Cair Pavarel.
Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are the quartet who find themselves placed to fulfil this prophecy. As such they have to carry the film, and are not bad in doing so. Little Georgie Henley as Lucy and William Moseley as Peter are very good indeed; Anna Popplewell as Susan and Skander Keynes as Edmund less so - but watching four children could easily tire the patience of an adult viewer and they were pleasing enough to watch.
CGI is employed to produce the battle sequences and the talking animals. Aslan, voiced by Liam Neeson, is an impressive creation, but others - the beavers and the fox - are obviously fake. None of the other animals or creatures (save the centaurs) are sufficiently magical in the way characters in the Lord of the Rings series were; although the film more or less keeps to the story Lewis wrote, and James McAvoy puts in an appearance as an impressive Mr Tumnus.
The screenplay does contain some howlers ('Gee up horsey' 'My name is Philip') but is basically very good. The soundtrack is largely modern, save an Andrews Sisters number early on (just to remind us we are in wartime no doubt). Thankfully someone resisted the temptation to follow the lead of the stage show which turned the book into a musical! What Adamson does well is to show us how the children develop to their new lives in a strange land. They meet the demands of battle and learn to cope with new friends and new dangers - the police are vicious wolves, Father Christmas stops to give them weapons of war, the Wicked Witch turns her enemies into statues; and there is the ritual sacrifice on the Table of Stone.
A promising start then. I look forward to seeing other instalments in the series and hope this film is a success.