Rilstone and confused blithering about the Narnia movie
Many of you will enjoy Andrew Rilstone's lengthy but brilliant run-down of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe". Incisive commentary and hilarious footnotes. What more could one ask?
I would love to have something to add to his insightful evaluation of the various changes made to the book's original story for the sake of film, but really, the thing that is eating my brain right now is this:
I enjoyed Peter Jackson's treatment of LOTR more than I enjoyed Andrew Adamson's adaption of LWW despite the fact that of the two directors, Jackson takes far more liberty with the cannon. I cannot understand why this should be. It's not that I didn't enjoy LWW. I did, very much. It was pretty and fun and made me laugh at good moments and well up at equally good moments and I was generally in approval of the (relatively small) departures from cannon*. It had adorable little English children and a non-pedophile faun. I liked it, I really did.
I did not, however, feel compelled to go see it multiple times in the theater, even though I could afford to do so much better than I could when the LOTR movies were coming out. Yet I saw each of the LOTR movies a minimum of three times each before they left theaters (I am now a little aghast to admit that I saw Fellowship eight times in theaters). Jackson's films played absolute havoc with the original canon, playing up some characters while playing down others, taking lines away from their rightful owners and bestowing them on random handy people for reasons unclear, adding on entire manufactured plot threads that served no discernible purpose within the story, even mangling some characters until all that linked them to their canon counterparts was a shared name (Farimir and Theoden? Can you hear me? Are you guys in there anywhere?)
All of these things drove me crazy when I watched Jackson's rendition of Tolkien, but I still wanted to watch it. A lot. Not so with Adamson's retelling of Lewis. I saw it once in theaters, would have happily seen it again if I'd had the time, but made no special effort to catch it again before it left the big screen. I will certainly buy the DVD when it becomes available, but I doubt that I will go to as much trouble and expense to procure it as soon as humanly possible as I did with the LOTR Extended Editions. Nor am I likely to watch the DVD and every single special feature it contains with anything approximating the avid delight that I had in the EEs.
So why is this? I have no real explanation. The only thing that I can think of is the excellence of Jackson's Middle-Earth compared to the relative generic quality of Adamson's Narnia. Jackson may have taken scandalous liberties with the story, but he meticulously created the setting to the book's description so that watching the movies was often like watching a faulty historic re-enactment played against the backdrop of the genuine scene of the real event. The movie setting of Narnia, in comparison, is almost as slap-dash as the canon Narnia is when compared to the canon Middle-Earth. The Narnians' swords were not as seemingly genuine, nor were their baddies (Tilda Swinton's stunning White Witch in Polar Bear War Chariot being the exception, of course).
Still, I'm not sure I can blame my relative lack of rabid fangirl delight for LWW entirely on the perceived authenticity of the setting and props (or lack thereof). It's just rather baffling to me that I can't seem to work up nearly the level of enthusiasm for LWW that I had for LOTR, even though the former admittedly gives me far less to disapprove of.
All that said, I'm still waiting with baited breath for "Prince Caspian" to hit theaters. The advent of my favorite talking mouse (see icon) upon the silver screen is enough to keep me excited about the franchise all by itself.
*The exceptions to this are (if memory serves) twofold: 1) Edmund's rescue. In the book, the Witch is about to cut his throat when Aslan's creatures retrieve him. In the movie, he was being sniggered at by Bilbo's scale double. I missed the lack of immediate threat to Edmund's life at the moment of his rescue. 2) As Rilstone points out in his post above, the perilous-crossing-of-the-melting-river-with-wolves scene is really rather silly and pointless: They realise that they are Action Movie characters. Peter develops an Indiana Jones like ability to, er, surf on lumps of frozen ice. Sticking a sword into the ice would be a good thing to do in the middle of a frozen lake. Apparently.
I would love to have something to add to his insightful evaluation of the various changes made to the book's original story for the sake of film, but really, the thing that is eating my brain right now is this:
I enjoyed Peter Jackson's treatment of LOTR more than I enjoyed Andrew Adamson's adaption of LWW despite the fact that of the two directors, Jackson takes far more liberty with the cannon. I cannot understand why this should be. It's not that I didn't enjoy LWW. I did, very much. It was pretty and fun and made me laugh at good moments and well up at equally good moments and I was generally in approval of the (relatively small) departures from cannon*. It had adorable little English children and a non-pedophile faun. I liked it, I really did.
I did not, however, feel compelled to go see it multiple times in the theater, even though I could afford to do so much better than I could when the LOTR movies were coming out. Yet I saw each of the LOTR movies a minimum of three times each before they left theaters (I am now a little aghast to admit that I saw Fellowship eight times in theaters). Jackson's films played absolute havoc with the original canon, playing up some characters while playing down others, taking lines away from their rightful owners and bestowing them on random handy people for reasons unclear, adding on entire manufactured plot threads that served no discernible purpose within the story, even mangling some characters until all that linked them to their canon counterparts was a shared name (Farimir and Theoden? Can you hear me? Are you guys in there anywhere?)
All of these things drove me crazy when I watched Jackson's rendition of Tolkien, but I still wanted to watch it. A lot. Not so with Adamson's retelling of Lewis. I saw it once in theaters, would have happily seen it again if I'd had the time, but made no special effort to catch it again before it left the big screen. I will certainly buy the DVD when it becomes available, but I doubt that I will go to as much trouble and expense to procure it as soon as humanly possible as I did with the LOTR Extended Editions. Nor am I likely to watch the DVD and every single special feature it contains with anything approximating the avid delight that I had in the EEs.
So why is this? I have no real explanation. The only thing that I can think of is the excellence of Jackson's Middle-Earth compared to the relative generic quality of Adamson's Narnia. Jackson may have taken scandalous liberties with the story, but he meticulously created the setting to the book's description so that watching the movies was often like watching a faulty historic re-enactment played against the backdrop of the genuine scene of the real event. The movie setting of Narnia, in comparison, is almost as slap-dash as the canon Narnia is when compared to the canon Middle-Earth. The Narnians' swords were not as seemingly genuine, nor were their baddies (Tilda Swinton's stunning White Witch in Polar Bear War Chariot being the exception, of course).
Still, I'm not sure I can blame my relative lack of rabid fangirl delight for LWW entirely on the perceived authenticity of the setting and props (or lack thereof). It's just rather baffling to me that I can't seem to work up nearly the level of enthusiasm for LWW that I had for LOTR, even though the former admittedly gives me far less to disapprove of.
All that said, I'm still waiting with baited breath for "Prince Caspian" to hit theaters. The advent of my favorite talking mouse (see icon) upon the silver screen is enough to keep me excited about the franchise all by itself.
*The exceptions to this are (if memory serves) twofold: 1) Edmund's rescue. In the book, the Witch is about to cut his throat when Aslan's creatures retrieve him. In the movie, he was being sniggered at by Bilbo's scale double. I missed the lack of immediate threat to Edmund's life at the moment of his rescue. 2) As Rilstone points out in his post above, the perilous-crossing-of-the-melting-river-with-wolves scene is really rather silly and pointless: They realise that they are Action Movie characters. Peter develops an Indiana Jones like ability to, er, surf on lumps of frozen ice. Sticking a sword into the ice would be a good thing to do in the middle of a frozen lake. Apparently.