In the interest of balance, the week after Brokeback Mountain we went to see a film beloved by the Christian Right. And I can see why. I think the reason I has such problems with the film was that I had read too many reviews and articles about C.S. Lewis beforehand and so had a head full of pre-conceptions about the sermonising religiosity of the film.
I suppose the question with which I struggled, was whether a film version of a book should stay true to all its underlying political, religious and social ideology. If the answer was yes then The Chronicles of Narnia... did a good job. I did, however, find all the Jesus stuff hard to swallow and took exception to some of the stuff it was preaching which seemed to be at odds with accepted modern values.
I think it was the some of the stuff I'd read, but I couldn't help noticing the kind of white superiority message and underlying misogyny of the film. Also something which I don't think was in the book was the glorification of war and fighting. I suppose it would have been acceptable if this had been an exclusively fantasy battle but there were obvious parallels between the battle for Narnia & WWII, which seemed to me to be decidedly dodgy. Also: it's supposed to be for kids! You can accuse rap vidoes of glorifying violence but when Father Christmas appears handing out weapons of war to kids something seems to be a bit wrong. Or maybe it's just me.
On the plus side it was a very pretty film, everything looked nice. The battle scenes were lovely to watch with a nice mix of mythical creatures. One thing I didn't understand was the arbitary division of animals between Good and Evil. (Why were the tigers Good and leopards Evil?) It set me thinking about which side different animals would be on (are giraffes Good or Evil? What about sloths?) so didn't pay much attention to the end of the film.
The kids were annoying and impossibly twee, Tilda Swinton was good but I couldn't get over her weird dress and Steve off of Shameless was fantastic as Mr Tumnus. Probably the best thing in the film.
So, it was alright to watch for a few hours but did annoy me a bit. Also, nothing could compare to the low-budget BBC series from the 80s, watched with child-like ignorance of the underlying, frankly quite dodgy, ideology. It gets 5
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