If you enjoyed the books, save yourself the torture, and read it again

Rating: 3/10 (3 January 2006)

I grew up having read the famous book, undoubtedly someone would one day try and convey this story upon the silver screen, it's actually a miracle it took them this long! Where do I start, its always hard taking someone's else imagination, work, story and moulding it into your own piece but people have done good jobs of this in the past "Charlie & The Chocolate Factory", "The Lord of the Rings Trilogy" & "Jurassic Park" to name a few books successfully turned into good movies. Also with such a entertaining book with detailed characters & good action scenes everything is in place for a good translation into a movie, unfortunately Andrew Adamson who directs this movie maybe thinks he can follow in his countrymen's footsteps (Peter Jackson also a famous Kiwi director) and although he did good with the Shrek Movies, it seems Mr. Adamson's skills lie in the animated movie industry as this film is diabolical from start to finish. Most of you will already know the story and premise of this famous story, 4 young children during World War II are evacuated to the countryside in rural England, from here the children stumble upon a cupboard in a strange professors huge house, upon entering the cupboard they arrive into a strange world, NARNIA. Their adventures in Narnia centre on saving the people from the evil rule of the White Witch who has plunged all of Narnia into eternal winter, with the help of Aslan the talking Lion they set about freeing Narnia. The problem with this movie is it seems VERY, VERY, VERY Rushed, where as LOTR spent years trying to recapture Tolkiens world of Middle earth, Narnia seems to have taken the blurb you get on the back of the book and created the film off that! The story is told at a frenetic pace and at 140 minutes long that's quite a feat, but even if they had made the movie longer and told the story better with these pathetic child actors in charge little could have been done to save this film. Peter the eldest and supposedly smartest of the bunch is totally unconvincing and his fight scenes are almost comedic, Little Lucy is just plain annoying rather then endearing & cute, Susan is very pompous more so then her character in the book and the one person who has the most material and characterization to play with fails miserably as a weedy unconvincing troubled young boy, Edmund, but at least he plays the cowardly part right. Liam Neeson provides the voice for Aslan and does his wise old man routine seen so successfully in Star Wars & more recently Batman, Mr. Tumnus played by James McAvoy from "Shameless" fame does well but the relationship between him & Lucy seems a bit too false, where as in the book it was well written. Tilda Swinton plays the White Witch the "bad guy" so to speak in this movie, and she does OK, but I think anyone could play this character as she has to look quite monotone & emotionless, almost wooden in her performance to pull it off, so stick a wig on Keanu Reeves and you'd get the right effect! The Beavers are by far the most entertaining characters along with the wolves but don't get nearly enough screen time, instead we're left looking at Peter holding a sword in an attack position looking like a complete donut for half the movie. My biggest gripe with this movie isn't how he hasn't made a good interpretation of the book, its the poor makeup & costume of some of the characters, the visual effects are excellent, CGI and all is good, but some of the creatures like the half horse half men, the Minotaur's (bull heads) and other creatures look like they are straight out of a TV serial that got cut after the first episode, just imagine watching the making of LOTR and seeing all the Orcs, Goblins, Uru-Kai's, Dwarfs & Elves masks made up by the crew that went horribly wrong and were thrown into the scrap heap, its almost like the Narnia crew snuck into this scrap heap and took what they could !
If you enjoyed the books, save yourself the torture, and read it again, or watch the old cartoon or old BBC TV series, this is so bad how Disney hopes to have started off a Lord of The Rings or Star Wars legacy is beyond me, this is more the start of something like Police Academy then anything else!