Pulling stuff out of nowhere and piling it on without any good sense can be a stylistic choice. Recently I watched Brian De Palma’s magnificent “Phantom of the Paradise,” in which the whole point is to keep throwing stuff in. “Faust,” glam rock, “Phantom of the Opera,” disfigurement, horror movie clichés, cocaine, deals with the devil, pop music satire, even “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (or, in this case, “The Security Camera Film of Dorian Gray”). But anyone who knows anything knows that what works for De Palma doesn’t usually work for Disney.
Anyway, I suppose I should mention the religious allegory of “Narnia.” It’s the same muscle-bound Christianity that has been running through the other “LOTR” movies and some of the “Matrix” films, in which the Christ figure demands utter vilification of his enemies and answers violence, for the most part, with even greater violence. There’s not much in the way of mercy and mysterious ways. Compare this to “Andrei Roublev,” which the Vatican named as one of the best movies ever made about religion. In it, men spend 3 hours being casually, abominably violent to one another, only to have God blow away their feeble attempts at might—not with a lightning bolt or a column of flame—but with one tiny bit of mercy. But I digress.
And, of course, ENOUGH. I’ve seen 9 ½ hours of this already, not to mention “Troy” and “Kingdom of Gladiators,” and I was never all that impressed to begin with. If you haven’t seen any of the movies I’ve just listed, or the last four “Harry Potter” movies, “Narnia” will still be fresh to you. Or maybe you can’t get enough of this stuff and don’t need it to change. I understand. But, for me, if this franchise is going to succeed with however many more books it has to film, it’s going to need something more than four present-day kids. Otherwise it will be indistinguishable from its imitators.
Finished Sunday, December 11th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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