Chronicles of Narnia: Huge Pile of Shit

April 20th, 2006 Posted in Blog Posts, Rants

My parents are back in Canada now; thanks to everyone who wrote in with touristy suggestions. Yesterday was their last night in town, so we rented a movie and ordered in some Chinese food. We settled on The Chronicles of Narnia, since it seemed like neutral ground: nobody’d seen it yet or felt terribly passionate about the subject matter. Karla “sorta” remembered the books from her childhood; I think I’d gotten a few chapters in and lost interest. We were all pretty much blank slates. That said, please keep in mind that I have no innate bias for or against the works of C.S. Lewis when I ask: what the fuck was that?

Seriously, what a mess. I don’t remember the original book being that long, but it must have been phonebook-sized, since the film sprints along from scene to scene like it needs to namedrop 40 characters by the ten-minute mark or get sued by the Lewis estate. Here’s Lucy! Peter! Edmund! The bland one! Here’s their mother! Whoop, now she’s gone! Here’s a maid and an old man! Now Lucy’s meeting a fawn! Now Edmund’s meeting a Queen! Now Peter and Blandy chat it up with some badgers! Wolves chase them! Santa Claus shows up and arms them with weapons! There’s a lion! Now he’s dead! Now he’s alive again! Okay!

And on and on with these fucking talking animals and minotaurs and unicorns and witches and apparently one of the animals is Jesus and how god-shitting drunk was C.S. Lewis when he wrote this? I say this as a guy who dug Lord of the Rings, a trilogy many would argue is pretty much the same deal as Narnia with slightly different pointed ears. At least Tolkein rooted his nonsense in Norse mythology — there’s elves and dwarves, who are good, and orcs, who are bad, and it might be a little silly, sure, but at least it all seems to make perfect sense to everyone in Middle Earth.

Narnia, on the other hand, is like the K-Mart discount bin of mythology. Every monster or creature you’ve ever heard of is incoherently tossed in with the animal kingdom, and now they all talk. I like fantasy as much as the next sixth level cleric, but the bare minimum for me is knowing the author gave his ridiculous shit more thought than I’ll have to. Narnia comes off like a shitty Trapper-Keeper drawing by a twelve-year-old who plays Dungeons & Dragons and really likes the zoo. In one scene a pair of badgers have a conversation with Santa Claus, and in another a human on a talking horse does battle with the White Witch of the North while griffins divebomb centaurs, and your head’s just spinning from the random senselessness of it.

Let me break this down for Harry Potter fans, since there seem to be a lot of you: it’d be like if someone rewrote the Harry Potter books, and instead of having a clearly defined world populated by a hierarchy of wizards and witches where everything makes consistent sense within the reality of that world, Harry Potter was suddenly teaming up with Merlin, Robin Hood and Zeus to fight the Easter Bunny and a talking elephant that’s also Ganesha. I hope your reaction would be “What the fuck?”

(Also, does everything talk in Narnia? What would you eat, if everything’s sentient? Apparently fish, if the talking gophers in the film are to be believed. So that’s one mystery solved. Everything in Narnia talks, except the fish, which are evidently retarded.)

I barely understood anything that was happening, and thanks to the film’s decision to abandon characterization for a cast of thousands, I barely cared either. In Lord of the Rings, they at least tried to make us give a dicktoss who the heroes were and explain how the world worked. When the blond-haired caped elves show up to fight the black, slavering, marauding orc hordes, you can sort of guess who to root for. Narnia, meanwhile, has a talking rhino run through the middle of a battlefield skewering centaurs and bears, and I’m sitting there wondering if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Hooray! The brave rhino killed the evil centaurs! Or… boo! The dastardly rhino killed the noble centaurs! Or… something.

For Christ’s sake, Santa Claus shows up in this film to give throwing knives to a seven-year-old. After you see something like that, the Jolly Green Giant could have arm wrestled the Trix Rabbit for a bowl of cookies and it’d wash right over you.

Anyway, four children end up defeating an army of unspeakable evil, which would strike you as the plot of a kid’s film until you actually see it. It’s dark, man. Animals are dying left and right; there’s evidently a political backstory between the White Queen and Aslan, the Happy Good-Time Lion; woodchucks discuss the Coming Darkness with fairies in hushed, frightened tones. You’re sitting there watching a movie that’s about ten times too stupid for adults, but ten times too violent and dark for kids, and wondering who the hell the core audience is for a movie like this. Then it makes five hundred billion dollars at the theater, so what do I know, obviously.

So: our child heroes defeat the evil army (though what they specifically do, what with the animals providing most of the strategy and hard work, is left ambiguous). After this, everyone rejoices and the four children are made kings and queens of Narnia. I’d love to see four foreigners stumbling through a closet into America try and establish a monarchy, but that’s neither here nor there. Nobody seems to find it at all alarming that an eight-year-old is now sovereign ruler of an entire country, so again, what do I know. Then some creepy shirtless fawn named Mister Tubbins or similar hits on pre-pubescent Lucy…

The Delectable Mister Tubbins

…and the movie’s over, with many adventures to follow, assuming the first-week domestic gross was favorable.

So that’s Chronicles of Narnia. What a huge pile of shit. I think my favorite scene was the one where Peter and siblings, trapped on an iced-over river on all sides by wolves, decide the best way to escape the situation would be to smash through the ice with a sword, sending everyone—wolves, children and all—into the near-freezing waters below. Seconds later the children are dusting themselves off as they walk out of the water, Peter’s plan apparently successful, and you’re left staring at the television screen like it just drooled all over the carpet. The one saving grace: if a movie this popular is convincing kids that it’s entirely harmless to jump into a nearly-freezing lake, clearly things will have sorted themselves out by next generation and we’ll be getting non-stupid movies by the time I’m a senior.