Fantasy for infants

Rating: 4/10 (17 January 2006)

One of the great things about fantasy as a genre is that it can be used to satirise aspects of our own world that we find repugnant. However, the trap of all fantasy films is that a certain grounding in reality has to take place. When a plot device is used, its function must be explained. When a character is able to perform a great feat, the reasons and means must be laid out. Before I go on, I should point out that one video critic laid out a series of rules for judging motion pictures by their titles. One such rule is that the longer the title, the worse the film will be. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a very, very long title. And in spite of having a special effects budget that would have had C.S. Lewis salivating, it becomes a very average, ordinary film. Then again, Lewis only gets it as bad as his more famous contemporary, relatively speaking.
There is another saying in creative work that when you adapt something into a new medium, you inherit the source material's flaws. Lion inherits quite a few of them, not least of which is Lewis' childish conception of a fantasy world and how it works. Characters are repeatedly killed, turned to stone, or otherwise unpleasantly dealt with. Prophecy, magic, and general plot devices are used to undo all these events. Gee, a world where there is no conflict, no death, and no consequence. You can keep this world, mister Lewis, because it sounds like the same thing as being dead to me. Admittedly, it has been a while since I read the novel on which this extended Play School was based, but I do remember a serious problem with being able to deal with consequence or change there, too. I know this will come as a shock after I have talked about how fantasy epics such as The Lord Of The Rings suffered from the director's wholesale mauling, but this is one case where a big difference from the source material would have helped.
Another amusing moment comes when a Santa Claus figure, riding a sleigh into the edge of a forest, hands three of the four children tools for their quest. He tells us that MoneyMas has not been celebrated in Narnia for a century, since the oh-so-evil White Witch came to dominate this land. The audience they are quite obviously aiming this film at might be too young to appreciate this, but as films like Bad Santa helped us appreciate, MoneyMas is only a celebration when you have succumbed to the brainwashing. So Jadis does not celebrate MoneyMas? Okay, get a fantasy creature army going on me, because I do not celebrate it, either. One more amusement is when Dwarrow are shown in the film as simply being diminutive Humans (and yet the presence of regular-sized Human children and adolescents seems so significant). Granted, this is Lewis' fantasy world and not necessarily meant to make physiological sense, but sending such creatures into battle does not tend to strike me as a good tactic.
Unfortunately, it is the battles of the film that let it down the worst. After years of viewing such delightful films as RoboCop, violence without consequence easily equals boring to me. And as I indicated earlier, consequence does not seem to have been a word in Lewis' vocabulary. There is no situation from which our characters cannot be given a reset button. Nor, it seems, is there any blood when a five hundred pound lion leaps on a woman who has to weigh a hundred and seventy pounds, tops. And therein lies the fatal flaw that has killed every fantasy film of the past ten years. Lion tries so hard to appeal to that mythical audience of all ages, and winds up appealing to nobody. Tilda Swinton does her best to appear menacing, and she does a decent job in some sequences, to give her credit, but the script literally undercuts her at every turn. It would have been interesting to see how Lion and the next Harry Potty film would have clashed together at the box office, because heaven knows they are made with the same mindset.
Words fail me when I try to describe the positives of this exercise in driving in the middle of the road. The film is slower than dragging a dead lion across a yard up to the end, when it suddenly attempts to give the sleeping adults in the audience some positive memories by staging a very ordinary battle sequence. To the credit of the director, he manages to resist the urge to shake the camera about, but the framing of shots is still nonsensical from the point of view of anyone who wants to see anything. To be fair, the film also manages to give viewers a sense of the chaos and suffering that drives the children into rural England in order to set up the action. It is rather amusing to hear Roger Ebert, a man who has been criticising films for several decades, describe Lion as a film sitting on the line between traditional family fare and some new kind of action-oriented family fare. To me, this is symptomatic of the MPAA's utter inability to recognise that there are adults in the audience, and they also have a right, as one expects when they pay obscene amounts of money, to be entertained.
I gave Lion a four out of ten. I was gnashing my teeth over whether to give it a five as I gave Jackson's abysmal attempt to put half of The Return Of The King on the silver screen. I even said to another audience member that Lion was a better film, as it certainly had a better sense of pace and flow. However, I lowered the score to four when I realised that so too do most test patterns.