A disappointment

Rating: 6/10 (8 May 2008)

I wanted to like this movie, but at almost all times I was aware that I was "watching a movie". It never really moved my soul. The acting was frankly very bad. The emotional depictions were worse. The screenplay wasn't great either. The scenery, the special effects, however - with the exception of most of the animals' talking - were good.
I began to hope that the appearance of Aslan would save the film, but he was a disappointment as well. The majestic King seems like a big stuffed toy from FAO Swartz.
The whole thing comes off as childish. I often thought that it would be OK to pass this movie off on a kid, but not an adult. Even the classic lines at the end, "After all, Aslan is not a tame lion / But he is good" simply had no power whatsoever.
In the inevitable comparison to the amazing Lord of the Rings trilogy, there simply is no contest. That's a shame, because the Lewis writings are truly superb and deserve far better treatment. Now that this version is done, it will serve as a firewall preventing a better interpretation from being done for a long time.
As I said, I wanted to like the movie. Not only do I enjoy the richness of the original story, I love its Christian underpinnings as well. I remember years ago being genuinely moved by a simple animated version of this story, especially the scene of the death of Aslan, where there was a holy silence that descended not only on the land of Narnia but on my own heart as well; but this expensive production barely stirred me. It may well be that Disney is simply out of its depth with this kind of rendering, that its massive corporate group-think actually works against producing an artistic work of this kind when using real actors rather than pictures.
That's sad, for what could have been but is not.