Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...

Fantasy is a funny thing, especially on film.

There’s a reason it’s traditionally been very hit and miss onscreen. There are plenty of beloved fantasy films, movies like THE WIZARD OF OZ or TIME BANDITS or Harryhausen’s SINBAD films or THE NEVERENDING STORY, and there are also a whole lot of really, really crappy and derivative fantasy films as well. When you fall in love with one of these movies, it tends to be a very personal thing. People don’t just enjoy these movies, they internalize them. I know I watched the Harryhausen films over and over as a kid, to the point where I had them memorized. Same thing with TIME BANDITS. I know people who swear by NEVERENDING STORY, even though it doesn’t do much for me. When they work, they engage us on a private level, speak directly to us in the language of our dreams.

But when they don’t work for you, when they don’t hit you in that personal place, they can be a dissociative chore. I know for me, it’s always sad when that happens. The reason I watch films is because I am a junkie, and I am always chasing that first childhood high. I wish I could say that THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH, & THE WARDROBE delivered for me. I wish I had been transported and delighted. As it is, NARNIA strikes me as a pretty box with no present inside, a great big almost. I think the first HARRY POTTER film wasn’t totally successful, but there were some great choices made that paid off for the franchise as a whole. With NARNIA, which is more difficult source material in the first place, I’m not sure that Disney did what they needed to do. I wasn’t enchanted enough to need another trip to Narnia any time soon, and I’m not sure most audiences will be, either.

The film starts well enough, certainly. In fact, the first 20 or 30 minutes, everything seems to work. London’s under blitz, and the war is etched in just a few memorable, harrowing scenes.

The Pevensie children are sent to live in the countryside with their uncle, the eccentric Professor Kirke (the always-great Jim Broadbent) until things calm down again. The four siblings find themselves living in this giant house, a bit stymied by all the rules imposed by Mrs. MacReady (Elizabeth Hawthorne), still upset about having to leave home. One afternoon, during a game of hide and seek, Lucy (Georgie Henley) stumbles into an old wardrobe. Pushing her way past some fur coats, she somehow steps through the back of the wardrobe into another world. As Lucy enjoys this first trip into Narnia, it’s appropriately magical, and it may be the best moment in the film. There’s a kid-on-Christmas-morning quality to Henley’s work that really sells it.

The first being she encounters is Mr. Tumnus (James McAvoy), a fawn with a human top half and strange animal hooves in place of legs. Some of the creature designs in the film, like Tumnus, are quite good, and they’re clever in the way they’re executed, but for every one that works, there are a handful that don’t, which breaks the spell of the film over and over. Lucy’s encounter with Tumnus confuses and excites her, and when she leaves Narnia, she excitedly tells her siblings what happened, and we see that no time passed while she was gone. Of course, the wardrobe doesn’t work when Lucy tries to show it to everyone else. It’s not until later that her brother Edmund (Skandar Keynes) finds his way through into Narnia as well. His first encounter is with the White Witch (Tilda Swinton), and it’s another of the film’s highlight. Both performers really click in this sequence. In fact, part of me wishes that the entire film was just about Lucy and Edmund, and their adventures on alternate paths through Narnia. They’re both established as interesting characters, and both young actors are very good. Unfortunately, Peter (William Moseley) and Susan (Anna Popplewell), the older kids, are pretty much zeroes from the moment they follow their younger siblings into Narnia. Since much of the story deals with Peter and Susan, it’s problematic. They’re each given perfunctory characters arcs about learning to use their weapons, but they can’t do anything to help bring the material to life. It sounds harsh, but in the case of Susan, that’s how she was written. She’s kept off the battlefield during the film’s climax, and she doesn’t seem to do anything that influences the outcome of the film in one way or another.

We're going to get into some serious spoilers in the next few paragraphs if you don't know the NARNIA story, so be warned. After all four kids arrive in Narnia, that’s when I felt myself starting to tune out, little by little. I found myself enjoying individual moments, bits of scenes, whatever kept me interested. The biggest problem, and one that’s not uncommon to the genre, is that the whole thing feels too easy. It’s more of a travelogue than a quest. At no point did it really feel like there was any danger for the kids. The worst thing the White Witch does to people is to freeze them, which ends up being awfully inconvenient when the good guys need reinforcements. The big battles comes across as a lot of build-up with very little pay-off or impact.

Even worse, the film irritates me the same way as the ’39 WIZARD OF OZ, an ending that not only negates all that’s come before, but actively undermines it. In OZ, we go from miserable black-and-white in Kansas to beautiful Technicolor Oz, and then back to Kansas at the end. For the theme to really work, the return to Kansas should have been in glorious Technicolor to show that Dorothy finally appreciated the beauty of the real world around her. Here, the kids grow to adults in Narnia after winning the war and turning back the perpetual winter, and they share a throne as a family. They have everything they could ever want. When they go back through the wardrobe into the real world, they revert to childhood, and they barely react and having so much time and experience stripped away from them. Everything they’ve just done resets to zero, so are we to read the entire adventure as nothing more than a long afternoon of make believe between some bored children? I’d be willing to buy that as an interpretation, but if that is true, then do we really need all the Jesus?

Because make no mistake... the movie wears its Christian allegory on its sleeve. For about 30 minutes, the film turns into THE PASSION OF THE LION KING, complete with a PG-rated scourging. If Aslan was a more engaging character, then I’m sure I wouldn’t care. Gandalf’s self-sacrifice and return in THE LORD OF THE RINGS was so effective, because we bought into him as an individual character, not as a metaphor. Aslan fails on almost every level. Liam Neeson’s a total waste of time, performance-wise. He’s done this so many times by now that he can probably do this in his sleep, and that’s what it sounds like. He’s the wise mentor... again... and he’s entirely professional about it, but it’s ultimately very, very dull.

He’s also sort of inert visually. Yeah, he looks like a lion, but beyond that, there’s nothing particularly interesting about him. There’s a nice mix between CGI and practical effects, and I’m not really criticizing the quality of the digital work... more the character of it, or lack thereof. Mr. and Mrs. Beaver (Ray Winstone and Dawn French) work better than Aslan as characters, which isn’t how it should be. Aslan’s the thing the whole film hinges on, and his failure is the film’s as a whole.

I’m sure NARNIA will do every well this Christmas, and I’m sure families will enjoy it. It’s a very safe film, right in line with director Andrew Adamson’s SHREK films. The film’s effects were farmed out to a variety of companies and it shows. There’s no unity in the way it all cuts together. There are any number of smaller complaints that I have, some of which are inherent to the source material, some of which are unique to the film, but it seems silly to gripe too much. NARNIA strikes me as entirely harmless, and if that’s what you’re looking for this holiday season, this’ll be your best bet.

I’m going to be busy between now and my departure for BNAT. Reviews of MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, SYRIANA, and KING KONG are all brewing now, as well as an oversized two-week edition of the DVD Shelf. Until then...