** (out of ****)
Starring ~ Swinton and Jim Broadbent, and featuring the voices of Liam Neeson, and Ray Winstone
Directed by Andrew Adamson & written by Adamson, Ann Peacock, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely, from the novel by C.S. Lewis
2005
140 min PG
The fourth “Lord of the Rings” film—cumbersomely subtitled “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe”—does introduce a handful of new faces. But, simply put, it is not substantively enough different from its three blowhard predecessors to maintain my interest. The franchise has a new director in Andrew Adamson (“Shrek”), Peter Jackson having bowed out to work on his forthcoming “King Kong” remake. There are a few new characters, new monsters, new gibberish, and, thankfully, the requisite two “battles to end all battles” have finally been reduced to one. Disney is now among the list of studio backers. Also, pleasantly, the embarrassing color-coding of the last three “LOTR” flicks has been fixed up. The “White Witch” of the title is the villainess, not the heroine; in the last three flicks she would have probably been called the “Black Witch,” “Witch of Color,” or “Witch of the Middle East.” But this new “LOTR” still features the same special effects, same pacing, roughly the same music, and the same basic look. I’ve seen this movie before and you have to do better than that.
The attempt-at-a-twist in the new “LOTR” is to see Middle Earth—which for some reason is always referred to as “Narnia” this time around—through the eyes of four British children from the 1940s. While staying in the country, they find a magic portal to a mysterious fairy kingdom, ruled by the dreaded White Witch (Tilda Swinton), whose nemesis is the benevolent talking lion Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson). Once there, the kids are swiftly embroiled in a battle between absolute good and absolute evil, where each child must choose sides in the eternal struggle between what is right and what is yadda-yadda-yadda raspberry noise. There are still orcs aplenty, although they’re shorter this time, and Frodo apparently has hooves in this one.
The production design and the acting are all perfectly adequate. It’s true that few modern, big-budget FX movies strive to make convincing, believable FX; most want to draw attention to every bit of trickery onscreen (compare this to “Good Night, and Good Luck” in which the digitally enhanced cigarette smoke tries its hardest to remain unnoticeable). “Lion-Witch-Robe” is in this majority, and we accept it as part of the territory. The four children are just fine and Tilda Swinton—who always baffles me with her balancing act of being asexual, creepy, and hopelessly irresistible—gets in some good glowering. But I was bored. I kept asking myself “when is my bladder gonna fill so I can stretch my legs?” My wife and I kept whispering lines from the Christopher Walken/centaur sketch from “Saturday Night Live” (“First question: Can I ride you?”).
Many of “Lion-Witch-Robe’s” issues come from C.S. Tolkien’s novel itself: the kids aren’t inspiring, Aslan is nondimensional, and the White Witch is a run-of-the-mill screamer and slapper of henchmen. In elementary school, the book was read to my class and then we watched an animated version of the movie. It was one of those glorious days when a 90-minute feature was stretched out to an entire school day thanks to recess, lunch, multiple role calls, and extensive playing of “the quiet game.” I didn’t really like “Lion-Witch-Robe” and, in the two decades that passed since then I had little interest in revising that opinion. (I did like how, in the book and both film versions, the kids spent so long in the fantasy world that they forgot about the real one.)
I think my biggest issue then and now is that, to paraphrase Chekhov, the book is all guns and no mantelpieces. (Chekhov—the Russian writer, not the navigator of the Enterprise—said that a gun placed on the mantelpiece in the first act must be fired by the third act.) There are certainly rules at work in Narnia, but only the author knows them, so, to the reader, stuff is continually being pulled from left field. Because absolutely anything can happen next, how can there be any suspense? How can our expectations be met, dashed, or surpassed, if we can’t form any expectations?
Does someone die? He comes back to life. Do our 1940s kids need to fight a monster? They spontaneously know swordplay, archery, and horseback riding. Is someone hurt? Here’s some magic potion. Do the characters need weapons? Well, here’s $%#ing Santa Claus to deliver them. I tried and I tried when I was little to figure out what rhyme applied to all this but could not, and threw up my tiny hands when I realized it was another one of those didactic “be more imaginative!” stories. (This is basically Roger Ebert’s complaint against “Labyrinth” from many moons ago, but I enjoyed that movie more because it set up its three key rules early on: 1) here’s the beginning of the maze, 2) there’s the end of the maze, and 3) Jennifer Connelly is hot.)
Page two of "The Chronicles of Narnia." Back to home.