Briefly on Narnia

I noted recently how the movie version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy seemed to me to get nearly everything wrong.

Happily, the first "Narnia" movie seems to get everything one would expect from the story close enough to 100% right.

I don't intend writing a review as such. There have been sufficient good ones in the media already, and I would mention David Edelstein's review in Slate as being pretty spot on. Strangely, I seemed to notice more hostile reviews in the British media than the American. See this one in The Times. But then, the Guardian review (as opposed to the Polly Toynbee commentary I posted on previously) gives it a "perfect" score. Strange, hey.

As the "positive" reviewers note, the movie differs from Tolkien in that it has a human intimacy (contributed no doubt by the fact that it has recognizeable humans in it!) Regular readers may recall I have no time for Tolkien at all. I guess that part of his appeal is due to the fascination that readers can develop with any really unique and detailed "universe" that writers of very lengthy fantasy (or science fiction) novels have to engage in.

However, with his review of Return of the King, Roger Ebert summarised well my whole objection to the LOTR (even though he still gave the movie 3.5 stars):

"There is little enough psychological depth anywhere in the films, actually, and they exist mostly as surface, gesture, archetype and spectacle. They do that magnificently well, but one feels at the end that nothing actual and human has been at stake; cartoon characters in a fantasy world have been brought along about as far as it is possible for them to come, and while we applaud the achievement, the trilogy is more a work for adolescents (of all ages) than for those hungering for truthful emotion thoughtfully paid for."

The funny thing is, even though the book and the movie are directed to a younger audience than Tolkien's, "Narnia" does have that emotional connection. For me, anyway.