glossy, shiny, empty adaption of a 'for children only' novel

Rating: 3/10 (23 January 2006)

I went into the film with mixed expectations - a friend of mine was enthused about it, another claimed it to be a total waste of time.
Itis a waste of time. The book by Lewis is a classic, which doesn't automatically make it good, filmable, or even relevant to todays society, morals, people, or just the individual viewer.
The acting by the kids is substandard, and that is relative to a standard set by child actors, who for the most part only succeed in being kids. Which they are supposed to be, during the first few minutes of the movie, at that point doing fine, therefore. Afterwards, when they're supposed to be heroes and villains, they simply fail. The costumes are outrageously bad. The white witch seems to protrude from some kind of portable xxl mix of victorian dress, refrigerator and michelin-man, the garb of the kids looks like cheap halloween costumes, the plate armour shows that the creator has at least seen lotr, but sadly also admits that he hasn't understood what was so great about the armour there. The cgi is not good. it's not bad either, but it fails to take you to fantastic places, meeting fantastic creatures;
some plot elements are awful, or awfully acted out: ------ the transition to traitor comes in a blink; ------ all kids, including the nearly grownup ones hide in a closet? ------ the girl is always chided for its seemingly extraordinary 'logicalness' whilst being only marginally more coherent than the rest. ------ is aslan a sadist, or why doesn't he tell the girls in advance he'll survive? ------ what, exactly, have the white witch and her secret police been doing these last 100 years, if the revolutionary army can peacefully assemble in a valley full of banners and brightly coloured tents? ------ the chase scene is as bad as any in 'knight rider' ever was; ------ the wolves, secret police of the evil witch, are incredibly inept; ------ the alpha-wolf, right hand to the evil witch, big bad evil overlord himself, attacks a kid with a sword - by jumping right into the point?? ------ no place in narnia is farther than an hours walk away, seemingly; ------ the whole ice-floe-waterfall thingy is plain dumb and the (cgi?)water oozes Caribbean warmth; ----- hiding under an outcropping while thunder of hooves is nearing (very lotr by the way) is fine, but in untouched snow? with the only traces leading directly there? (the traces-in-snow issue is completely left out throughout the film, presumably because all of it was edited in later, thanks, again, to cgi); ------ nothing relevant the children do has to be done by them or even any human children ------ why the fuss?. their sheer existence seems to provide the solution to all ill; ------ the white witch has not the voice needed to whip up three henchmen, bar thousands of them; ------ the battles (lotr-esque, again) are bloodless and pathetic. if that's for the sake of the children in the audience, so be it, but then as a consequence the battle ought have been a less integral part of the storytelling. ------ no props or buildings in narnia that weren't either bad, cgi, or bad cgi.
summary: avoid it, or take your kids <10 (the 12yo behind me noticed a major logical flaw(not mentioned above, trying to find it helps against the urge to sleep through the movie))