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Post by Lianne on Dec 23, 2005 11:55:41 GMT -5
I dont know if anyone here has seen this movie but it was beautiful to watch and very well done i thought! I sat there the entire time leaning forward with my hands onmy face smiling. It was one of my favourite books as a kid, now i might just have to buy it again!
I absolutely fell in love with Mr. Tumnus's character too by the way.
It is definately a movie that i need to see again on the big sc reen
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Post by Fluffy on Jan 8, 2006 11:06:38 GMT -5
To tell the truth, I was a little disappointed. There were beautiful shots, and the wardrobe was awesome, and Mr. Tumnus and Professor Diggory were great, but - okay, who else watched the Beavers and kids hide on the far side of the frozen river while the sleigh was coming up and suffered the temptation to swat the One Ring out of Lucy's hand? That was so Fellowship of the Ring, you know? Plus what was up with the gratuitous LotR reference when Jadis said "We have work to do"?
I noticed that Alan Lee, one of the LotR artists, is still on board with Richard Taylor / the Weta Workshop, and I could see his very positive influence on some of the design, and I recognised the awesome MASSIVE program at work on the battle scenes. Yay for that.
Boo to Jadis' medieval equivalent of shoulder pads. What was up with that honking inverted cone at the top of her first dress?!
And now for my biggest problem with the film, which I blame entirely on Disney and the director: the Stone Table sequence. There are two main plot points to the book of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; one is Edmund's transformation, which, thanks to that outstanding young actor and good to very good screenwriting around his character, was well portrayed. The other is the idea of the Deeper Magic.
At the dawn of Narnia, which was created by an unnamed force/being, Diggory and Polly accidentally brought Jadis from another world into Narnia. Aslan, who is part of or the direct creation of the unnamed force/being, made a treaty with the invading Jadis that she could have power over all those beings false and treacherous. This is the Deep Magic, which was embodied in the Stone Table, upon which Jadis was permitted to sacrifice traitors to her own power. But Aslan, being connected to the unnamed force/being, knew that Narnia was created with a magic stronger than the magic of his earthly treaty with Jadis. He knew that by the principles woven into Narnia by the unnamed force/being, he could appeal to a Deeper Magic which dictated that if a non-traitor willingly died for a traitor, Jadis' power would be destroyed. (Note to future lawyers: Jadis stood in breach of contract when she sacrificed a non-traitor, ergo the treaty could be held invalid. )
The thing is - this means that we, as viewers, should have been aware of the awesome power of the Deeper Magic. The scene at the Stone Table should have been imbued with a power and scariness equal to or greater than that in the scenes with the One Ring in LotR, particularly those when Frodo offered it to Gandalf or Galadriel. And it wasn't. It was scary in the way that mob violence is always scary, but that's all it was - mob violence. The magic was barely represented by the breaking of the Table and the return of Aslan, but you know, there should have been some sort of magic effect - like the wave/boom when Sauron lost the One Ring in the prologue of FotR or something. There wasn't. Disney probably decided that would be Too Scary, or more likely Not Fundamentalist-Christian Enough. Grr.
So yeah, I ended up feeling like this was just a sort of Julius Caesar with talking animals instead of a Fantasy Story in the grand tradition. And that was a bummer.
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