Review: Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia on Buena Vista DVD

The features on this elaborate two-disc collection have been smartly divided into two categories to mirror the different worlds of the film.

The Chronicles of NarniaC.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe always seemed like The Lord of the Rings for Sunday Schoolers, yet for the most part, Disney’s lavish cinematic adaptation of the novel focuses less on its ever-present and distracting bibilical allegory (which caused even Lewis’s pal J.R.R. Tolkien some indigestion) and more on its magic-and-monsters fantasy. It’s a futile tactic, though, as Andrew Adamson’s film, while respectable, can’t escape the lengthy shadow of Peter Jackson’s Academy Award-winning Rings trilogy, proving incapable of approximating a suitably epic scale or an emotional or thematic resonance to sustain its out-of-this-world adventure from start to finish. And in the wake of last month’s fourth Harry Potter installment, the sight of cyclopes, minotaurs, centaurs, ogres, dwarfs, fauns, and all types of talking forest animals—as well as the image of wide-eyed kids trying to come to terms with the extraordinary creatures before them—merely elicits a disinterested ho-hum that’s only moderately palliated by Tilda Swinton’s malevolently icy performance as the White Witch, Narnia’s would-be conqueror. Its CGI serviceable, Adamson’s direction competent, and its young lead actors solid and largely affectation-free, Narnia’s tale of four kids during WWII who stumble upon a wardrobe which allows them access to a wintry Never Never Land nonetheless persistently feels wearisomely familiar and slight.

Despite Adamson and his three fellow screenwriters’ thorough attempts to whitewash the story’s more religious features, the film still never manages to fully escape its roots as a spiritual parable. And the devout (who’ve been setting up church-sponsored screenings around the country for the past month) will find significant Christian undercurrents to latch onto, primarily because Lewis’s narrative was a model of unsubtle New Testament symbolism. When responsible Susan Pevensie (Anna Popplewell) tells younger sister Lucy (Georgie Henley) that a wardrobe can’t operate as an inter-dimensional portal because “logically, it’s impossible,” the unspoken implication—you gotta have faith—hangs heavily in the air. Once in Narnia, the kids quickly find themselves at the center of an impending war between the Satanic White Witch and Christ-like Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson), a virtuous lion who ultimately dies for the sins of Judas-ish Pevensie brother Edmund (Skandar Keynes)—as well as for the good of Narnia—only to be reborn in time to conquer the forces of evil. To say that it’s all more than a bit simplistic and heavy-handed would be a severe understatement. But there’s no denying the unintentional hilarity of Aslan’s overwrought death scene, in which he’s bound, shaved, mocked by a screaming mob, and killed in some sort of surreal anthropomorphic PG version of The Passion of the Christ.

Image/Sound

Not a pretty film but the image is wonderfully detailed: The snow is vibrant-bright white but never overblown-and the wardrobe (at least in the little of it that we see) reveals remarkable textures on its surface. The only real problem is edge enhancement-a minor nuisance but present almost entirely throughout. The DTS track is a beast to be reckoned with. It’s so good it almost makes Aslan seem scary.

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Extras

Two commentary tracks on the first disc, one by director Andrew Adamson and the four young stars of the film, the other by Adamson, production designer Roger Ford, and producer Mark Johnson. Plenty of sweet reminiscences spread out across both tracks. The first one suggests Adamson flipping through a photo album with a group of British street urchins huddled around him, and for the second, because Ford couldn’t join Adamson and Johnson, his transmission (possibly from a speaker phone) brings to mind someone chiming in from a different world (in this case Australia). Also on disc one: a bunch of bloopers and a feature that splatters “fun facts” on the screen throughout the film. The serpentine features on disc two are divided into two categories. Under Creating Narnia: a totem to Adamson (who apparently “makes movies for the child in all of us” and considers the film a “small, character-based movie”), the grueling but “magical” process the film’s young actors underwent in order to bring their characters to life, a four-part chronicle of the film’s evolution from book to screen (it begins with a C.S. Lewis bio and ends with the creation of the film’s creatures), and an anatomy of the impressively constructed melting river scene. Under Creatures, Lands & Legends, you can explore the world of Narnia via a really detailed interactive map, follow the storyline using an interactive timeline, and get to know the creatures of the world through Lewis’s prose.

Overall

The features on this elaborate two-disc collection have been smartly divided into two categories to mirror the different worlds of the film. A fun and literate package.

Score: 
 Cast: Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Tilda Swinton, James McAvoy, Jim Broadbent, Kiran Shah, James Cosmo, Judy McIntosh, Elizabeth Hawthorne, Patrick Kake  Director: Andrew Adamson  Screenwriter: Andrew Adamson, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, Ann Peacock  Distributor: Buena Vista Home Entertainment  Running Time: 135 min  Rating: PG  Year: 2005  Release Date: April 4, 2006  Buy: Video, Soundtrack, Book

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