Narnia: Voyage of the Yawn Treader

You have to feel a little bit sorry for this third instalment in the Chronicles of Narnia coming out when Harry Potter 7a (as they like to call it on Wittertainment) is still riding high in the movie charts. Next to the bespectacled wizard, CS Lewis' stories show their age although the influence on JK Rowlings books is stark.

Both carry at their heart the battle between good and evil; the problem with Narnia, and in particularly the Dawn Treader, is that the story comes across as overly moralistic and the religious metaphors lack any subtlety.

A further problem with Dawn Treader is that its central story thread just feels, well a little lacklustre. In the Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe there was the excitement of discovering Narnia and freeing it from the icy grip of the White Witch. Prince Caspian had a wronged handsome prince fighting to get what was rightfully his back.

The story of Dawn Treader sees some characters we've never heard about before have disappeared into the mist. Literally. So Prince Caspian and the two youngest Pevensie children, Edmund and Lucy, accompanied by a reluctant cousin Eustace decide to go and find them.

What follows is a predictable and linnear narrative. When we are told that the mist will bring to the fore a person's darkest fears (inspiration for deatheaters anyone?) you can easily tick off the list of the effects it is going to have on each of the central characters. That Eustace starts out as an obnoxious, albeit quite an amusing, brat and will have some sort of epiphany turning him into a hero too is obvious.

So what is left is the journey itself. And here is does redeem itself a little. The boat is just how a boat in a kids fantasy should be, a cross between a viking long boat and a tudor ship. They encounter all sorts of weird and wonderfully imagined creatures, there are invisible mansions and people that have been asleep long enough for the jungle to grow up and into their hair and beards. And there is a dragon and a big scary monster.

Voyage of the Dawn Treader is never going to win against Harry Potter. It is up there in the imagination stakes but lacks the humanity, humour and dare I say it, complexity of the wizarding world. It is nontheless a more or less entertaining film with a genuinely moving ending even if it did have the aetheist in me cringing.

It gets three stars out of five from me, Rotten Tomatoes gives it 50% and Metacritic 54%

 

Comments

[Rev Stan]

Thanks for that explanation Simon. Must admit I've not read beyond Prince Caspian. Translation from page to screen is always tricky and often much of the subtlety is lost.
I'd be interested to know what a fan of the book thought of the film.

[Simon Pudsey]

The problem with the Narnia books, is that there is a degree of religious theming, but this was only part of the multi-layer nature of the grand scheme. Having read the superlative "Planet Narnia", you can actually see the planetary influences in each of the books. In this book it is the Sun which takes prominence (Jupiter in LWW and . This kind of imagery and thinking can be hard to convey in a simplistic visual format and therefore the film can only ever be a shadow of the book. It also becomes horribly evident that Tolkien used the same thinking and imagery in his "Lord of the Rings" (both were scholars of medieval thinking at Oxford at the same time). You can almost believe that they cooked both sets of books up together. Tolkien took his in a different direction but its all there.

[Vicola]

But in it's defence it does have the VERY attractive Ben Barnes in so even if the storyline isn't up to much, you can always sit back and admire the view...