The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The movie I went to see this week was the latest Chronicles of Narnia installment, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, directed by Micheal Apted (who directed The World is Not Enough). This was also the first movie in this series to not be directed by Andrew Adamson (who directed the first two Narnian movies and the first two Shreks) which I think was a great move seeing as I thought the first two movies were an all-around let down.

Dawn Treader follows pretty much the same story line as the others, children are swept out of the mundane drag of everyday english life into a magical world under attack by an evil force with no origin. Many of the characters from the first three stories reappear on the Dawn Treader; including Lucy, Edmund and Caspian; but this time a new person is introduced to Narnia, Lucy and Edmund’s ever complaining cousin Eustace.  Together they set out to discover the source of a mysterious green fog that has been stealing people. Now even with this generic story line, I thought the movie was pretty good, you just have to keep reminding yourself it was meant for families and children.

As a “movie”

The production of the movie was particularly good. It was really well shot (not like a major motion picture would be recorded on a tripod and vhs camera). When a large amount of the story on the confined quarters of a boat, it takes a clever eye to set up angles and shots that will keep the visuals from being repetitive, and this movie did just that. The camera movement was pretty dynamic and there weren’t many times when the shots got boring (I mean it kept the attention of the dozen 6 year olds who sat in front of us better than a clown catching fire). One interesting thing I noticed was the use of steady cam throughout the film. The majority of shots were smooth and had nice tracking but every once and a while shots had a great deal of camera shake. This mostly happened when the evil green mist appeared and caused the characters to give into temptation, which I thought was cool. I thought the best shot scene was the transition into Narnia. The Children went from sitting in a room in England to swimming in the open Narnian ocean in such a fluid way that you couldn’t tell when the room actually disappeared.

Another neat part of this flick was the special effects, the bread and butter of these studio productions nowadays. Whenever I go into these fantasy movies I am usually skeptical that the director is going to portray the magnificence the way I’ve envisioned it in my head. Its hit or miss if the monster looks like a towering incarnation of fear, or Gary Busey in green make up. But Dawn Treader was really visually pleasing, even more so than the first and second movies. All I can say is; sea serpents are gnarly.

But what I was most impressed with was the casting. Now the casting of Georgie Henley as Lucy and Anna Popplewell as Susan doesn’t really pertain to this movie, but in this movie you are really convinced that they could be sisters. There are times when one of their face’s morphs into the other and you literally cannot tell what’s happening until you’re looking at an entirely different girl. But perhaps my favorite part about the cast was the role of Eustace Clarence Scrubb played by Will Poulter. This cat did a real good job in this role. At first he starts off as the annoying and whimpy kid who get pulled along on these adventures and he nails that part so well that one can’t help but hate him for being a nuisance. At the beginning of I LITERALY hated his face. I mean everything down to his tone of voice, posture and eye movement was right on mark. But even more impressive than that is the change he undergoes by the end of the film. His entire façade changes and you find yourself actually believing in that change.

Entertainment

Okay I remember that at some point when I was a kid I read these books, all of them, multiple times, and I remember thinking they were all around awesome. However, there is no way I could even tell you the names of the characters it’s been so long, so I’m sorry to those diehard fans of Narnia if I overlook the fact that the film version left out the “best” parts of the book. But that’s what movies do, they take the jist of books and spoon feed them to mindless masses that are too lazy to read for themselves, it’s the way of Hollywood, I’m just here to tell you if the gruel in the spoon tastes good enough to swallow.

And in this case I thought it was pretty tasty, all things considered. And by saying all things considered I mean keep in mind that this movie was made for families, and families with small children at that. So seeing as I’m a 22 year old male with some serious longing for sex and explosions in my movies, if you fall into the demographic of family you may want to disregard this rant. The movie was good for adults but it was made for kids, why else would you have a story with obvious monsters, fights and murders and not show a single drop of blood. Seriously no blood at all! There is a moment where a minotaur is swinging an ax at a man and the man simply bounces off. A FREAKING AX! That should have for sure cleaved a man in half in the goriest of fashions. This was one of the things I couldn’t stand about the first two. If I’m watching a full scale war between my favorite mythical creatures I want it to be raw as hell. At the very least everyone should bleed rainbows. Now I understand that for a little girl, seeing a unicorn being brutally clubbed to death may be a little too much, so that’s why I think some studio should remake the Narnia movies with an R rating. It’s not like Hollywood has something against reproducing the same story over and over and over and over again, and let’s face it Narnia could use some sexing up.

But if all you want is a nice retreat from reality and you can handle all the life lessons about being able to live comfortably in your own skin, this is a good way to spend a little under 2 hours. I would have to give it a 7 of 10

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