Sky’s big Christmas Day premiere is The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the movie adaptation of the well-known Narnia tale by CS Lewis. The unlikely person calling the shots is Andrew Adamson, who was behind the Shrek movies. As expected, then, there’s rather a lot of CGI in the film. It’s also a very “post-Lord of the Rings” movie. It seems that no epic fantasy these days can end without a massive battle featuring thousands of beings on screen at once.
The best parts of this production are the earlier sections concerning the initial discovery of the wardrobe and its magical quality of connecting a country house bedroom to a snowy faraway land populated by strange creatures. The beavers (voiced by Dawn French and Ray Winstone) are particularly good fun and the mighty Aslan is a superb piece of computer animation.
Some of the other effects work is a little less impressive, though, suggesting that the sheer scale of the biggest sequences was too much to handle at times. The script is also rather creaky, lacking the light touch of Peter Jackson’s comparable trilogy. It strives to remain faithful to the Narnia source material, which is all very well, but it can be somewhat heavy-handed (and Lewis drew plenty of detractors for his all-too-obvious religious symbolism).
Despite its dark moments, Jackson’s Lord of the Rings managed to sneak a few witty moments into the dialogue. Still, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe at least has a consistently identifiable villain to hiss at in the form of Tilda Swinton’s White Witch, who excels in her otherworldly role.
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