impressions of narnia
We saw Narnia this weekend. It was such a wonderful production that I feel bad quibbling about it. The new-agey Celtic soundtrack with pop over the credits. Really? Alanis? Really? And Liam Neeson must have sounded like a great idea in some board meeting, but the moment Aslan opened his mouth I thought, "Snagglepuss." And Snagglepuss never left me the entire time. Couldn't they have gotten Anthony Hopkins? Just hear him say, "Welcome, daughter of Eve," and you get shivers.
Of course, the real problems are carried over from the book. The movie so faithfully tells the book's story that it reproduces the book's flaws as well. The main one has to do with Aslan himself. Lewis said over and over that the book was not to be read as a mirror of scripture. But he did say that his goal was to imagine another world and ask how God would interact with that world. And in this, I think, he failed.
This doesn't take away his success in telling a great series of stories. They're beloved for a reason: they're just marvelous tales, and their resonance with the Christian mythos works wonderfully on that level. But in answering the question of how God would interact with a world such as Narnia, Lewis is guilty in the way most of us are: His Aslan is exactly the Messiah that we all wanted and God didn't give us.
The truer Son of the Emperor Beyond the Sea isn't a majestic roaring lion. He's a donkey. And all those noble beasts — the lions, the centaurs — are the ones who despise him and try to snuff him out, and eventually put him to death on the Stone Table. Right? On a deeper level, those last scenes with the killing and then the great battle look a lot more like a Hindu world or a Manichean one than a Christian one.
But, again, I quibble. The movie, like the book, is thrilling. It's got heart and plot and good actors.
One other thing I noticed about the voice casting. In the Narnia of my childhood imagination, just past the bloom of the Cold War, I gave the wolves, Jadis's greedy, powerful, unbeatable, snarling henchmen, Russian accents. Quite natural of me. In the movie, they're Americans.
Of course, the real problems are carried over from the book. The movie so faithfully tells the book's story that it reproduces the book's flaws as well. The main one has to do with Aslan himself. Lewis said over and over that the book was not to be read as a mirror of scripture. But he did say that his goal was to imagine another world and ask how God would interact with that world. And in this, I think, he failed.
This doesn't take away his success in telling a great series of stories. They're beloved for a reason: they're just marvelous tales, and their resonance with the Christian mythos works wonderfully on that level. But in answering the question of how God would interact with a world such as Narnia, Lewis is guilty in the way most of us are: His Aslan is exactly the Messiah that we all wanted and God didn't give us.
The truer Son of the Emperor Beyond the Sea isn't a majestic roaring lion. He's a donkey. And all those noble beasts — the lions, the centaurs — are the ones who despise him and try to snuff him out, and eventually put him to death on the Stone Table. Right? On a deeper level, those last scenes with the killing and then the great battle look a lot more like a Hindu world or a Manichean one than a Christian one.
But, again, I quibble. The movie, like the book, is thrilling. It's got heart and plot and good actors.
One other thing I noticed about the voice casting. In the Narnia of my childhood imagination, just past the bloom of the Cold War, I gave the wolves, Jadis's greedy, powerful, unbeatable, snarling henchmen, Russian accents. Quite natural of me. In the movie, they're Americans.
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