My wife is a secondary school drama teacher, she loves drama and the power it has to create emotion and connect audiences (think the end of Hamnet); yet as a teacher of a failing and lazy generation she is always at great pains to tell the young boys and girls that drama and theatre is not merely about learning lines; if you want to go into law, it might be good to know how to speak publicly with confidence, or if you are more creatively inclined, why not endeavour to learn about lighting, costume or set design to help with the formation of a production.
The reason a film blog starts with a drop of drama, is that my wife is putting on a school production of C.S.Lewis' seminal work The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. During an evening of preparation on her end, we put on the 2005 film adaptation of the film from Disney Studios. I had seen bits of the film but never the film in full, and so this is a debrief on a full first time watch of the film.
Directed by Andrew Adamson, the director of the first two animated Shrek films, this his first foray into live-action cinema; it is a faithful adaptation of the classic Narnia story. Featuring a mixture of established adult talent - Tilda Swinton, James McAvoy (on the crest of stardom) and Jim Broadbent, along with four newcomers as the Pevensie children and very famous voice actors led by Liam Neeson as Aslan the formidable lion.
What struck this viewer from the outset of the film, is how only four years after the first Harry Potter film and six years after the first Lord of the Rings film; this was Disney's genuine attempt to obtain a new age franchise after the success the previous two iterations gave to Warner Bros. and New Line cinema.
Lets do the check-list and recipe for success, Disney felt you needed. Beloved children's literature story with something for children and adults. Check. The first entry in a series of possibly five to seven films. Check. A New Zealand director. Check. Key casting of future Hollywood stars in the key roles of the children. Rain check.
And that for me was the problem with the viewing experience, the four children cast in the roles of Lucy, Susan, Edmund and Peter are sadly nowhere near the level of the three cast in the Potter series which was definitely lightning in the bottle.
This goes hand in hand with CGI that looks a bit ropey in a post LOTR world, some scenes are shot in near darkness making it hard to see who is where on screen. This was a similar problem that faced the Philip Pullman adaptations - an imagined fantasical world but from a bygone WW2 era just did not go hand in hand with the new millennium audience with technology at their fingertips. Nevermind the christian symbolism and allegory that runs throughout Lewis' tale.
However, one note of the film is that the script was doctored or overseen by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely; the duo who would go on to write the majority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (beginning with Captain America (2011) and up to Avengers: Endgame (2019)), some of the best written films of this century. It should be noted that the battle scenes between Aslan and Edmund's army and the opposition of the witch's army is not too dissimilar to the battle in Wakanda during Avengers: Infinity War (2018) in terms of scope and stakes culminating in the return of a hero on the battlefield.
When the overlong film does conclude, the children learn about sacrifice and there is a richness to imagination being fermented in the youth. There is however, an overall feeling of the film not quite fulfilling its objective and being as good as it should be. However, it does have a great final line delivered by Jim Broadbent
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is available to stream on Disney+ along with Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
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