Despite this film’s flaws, the magic of C.S. Lewis’s story comes through.
By:Elise Nakhnikian
I must have read the seven books that make up the Narnia Chronicles two or three times as a kid before learning that Aslan, the lion king of Narnia, was meant to be Christ and I only found out then because my mom, pressed to explain why she didn’t like the books, ‘fessed up. I felt dismayed and betrayed (we take our atheism pretty seriously in my family), and I never quite trusted author C.S. Lewis again, but I forgave him, after realizing that the stories worked just as well if you ignored the Christian symbolism. There was so much else to enjoy in them, starting with the lion, the witch and the wardrobe of the first and best of the series.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe sticks closely by the book’s plot, though it expands on some passages while contracting others. Director Andrew Adamson (Shrek) and screenwriter Ann Peacock, who wrote HBO’s sensitive adaptation of Ernest J. Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying, start strong. Spinning a passing reference to World War II bombing raids into a series of dramatic scenes, they introduce us to the four Pevensie children and their predicament.
As you watch headstrong Edmund (the scowling Skandar Keynes), loving little Lucy (Georgie Henley, who has a sweet lisp), eternally rational Susan (the somewhat wooden Anna Popplewell) and big brother Peter (William Moseley, who looks like a male Scarlett Johansson), scurry into a bomb shelter or leave their mother to join a trainload of parentless children escaping London, you understand the peril they’re in. You also sense how rootless and vulnerable they feel in the cavernous, parentless house where they wind up.
Then Lucy steps into a wardrobe in the spare room and falls right past the fur coats into Narnia. The script follows in Lewis’ footsteps again as Lucy’s siblings follow her into this enchanted place where fauns and centaurs are as common as grass, the trees have ears, and even the most plebeian animals can talk. But the Pevensies don’t have much time to soak in the sights before they’re called upon to save themselves and Narnia.
In the end, it’s Aslan who saves the day, but the kids do their part. Susan, Peter and Lucy face down their fears as they narrowly escape capture by the White Witch (Tilda Swinton), the despot who has plunged Narnia into perpetual winter for the last hundred years. And Edmund wrestles with his own worst impulses, having fallen under the witch’s spell and betrayed his siblings when she appealed to his vanity and greed.
Not all the struggles are internal. When the White Witch declares war on Aslan, their armies clash on the battlefield. The battle, which occupies just a couple of pages in the book, dominates the last third of the movie. This would have had a deadening effect in any case, but it feels positively suicidal following Peter Jackson’s excellent adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth epic. In the wake of The Lord of the Rings, Narnia’s scenes of homunculi forging weapons and a polar-bear-powered chariot charging to battle look more humdrum than horrific: LOTR Lite.
Swinton’s White Witch is truly chilling, as pitiless and alert as some gorgeous insect masquerading as a human. James McAvoy’s Tumnus the faun is enchanting, a wide-eyed prey skittering nervously through the listening forest. But most of the rest of Narnia’s population including a pair of cartoonishly kindly CGI beavers and a centaur whose face is a little too sculpted fall just this side of believable. Even the snow that blankets Narnia looks like that Styrofoam-y stuff you see in department store Christmas displays. Worst of all, Aslan looks more muppet-ish than magnificent.
In a 1959 letter to a BBC producer, Lewis said he approved of a radio version of the story and suspected that an animated movie could work, but he was "absolutely opposed " to a live-action version. "Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare," he wrote.
Computers can do things even Lewis could not have imagined 50 years ago, yet I thought of his words as I watched the movie’s Aslan blink soporifically, as if he’d been hit with a tranquilizer dart.
Lewis’ story is such strong magic that I enjoyed the movie, in spite of its flaws, right up to the last 20 minutes or so. And judging by the cheers and applause in the audience, the kids in the theater stayed with it right to the end.
But those who were looking forward to The Chronicles of Narnia as a means of spreading the gospel are likely to be disappointed. A computer-generated kitty cat, however loudly it may roar, just doesn’t have the gravitas you want in a Christ figure.
Rated PG. Contains battle sequences and frightening moments.

