And I mean random.
- You should see Edmund's pocket torch! It's huge.
- You can tell some of the music is absolutely the same as the last movie. When they get into Narnia they play the same exact "We got into Narnia" music. When you see a picture of Mr. Tumnus on the wall it's the same ""Tumnus" music...
- When Prince Caspian blows his horn it is sort of dumb.
- When they attack the castle Peter says "For Narnia!" the exact same way he says it in LWW only he doesn't say "And for Aslan". (shocking!)
- The Minotaur and the gate are right out of The Red Keep.
- Susan is like Legolas.
- Mice play bagpipes. And they have really long tails.
- When Lucy dropbottles Trumpkin his wounds don't go away but Edmund's do in LWW.
- Susan throws arrows in battle. It doesn't work - you can't really throw arrows.
- When there is Prince Caspian music the way it starts is like the first three notes of the Gondor theme. (It goes up a fifth but that's nothing special - a lot of Bach fugues do that.)
- There is lots of blue scale armor that looks strange.
- There's no Gwendolyn and no nurse. No Bacchus of course because he's too wild.
- Aslan is a bit unreal because he's been inflated.
- The centaurs look awful and look like they've been growing mold since LWW. (?)
- There was a kid centaur.
- The badger was awful and slithy and really weird. He was skinny and fat and he waddled.
- The dwarves were better than in LWW.
- They had really complicated catapults.
- The river god was awesome.
- I could make lists of the things right out of LOTR.
- Cornelius was too fat and too tall and too wonky and he wore pince-nez.
- The attack on the castle was really wrong as they couldn't possibly win. It was not Narnia style warfare.
- Aslan's Howe was very well done.
- Reepicheep is not as valiant as in the book.
- They got Destrier very right. (I wonder if Kateri the horse lover agrees?)
- The characters are flatter. There is no dialogue worth repeating or acting out like we do with LWW.
- Susan hits everyone with her arrows and she never runs out of arrows.
- There is the Legolas trick of jumping onto a centaur. But no one is supposed to ride a centaur until The Silver Chair.
- (note no one would even mention the you-know-what between Susan and Caspian)
They all liked the movie and are anxious to see it again, this time with me. (Not sure how we're going to arrange that one but it does sound tempting.) After reading various reviews I was really hesitant to let Mary Rose go as she is easily frightened by movies, and I had her half convinced to stay home. But when Michael arrived home to take them all out he said she had to go. It was also very endearing the way they big kids all said she had to go as well, so off she went. She's nearly eight and had never been to a movie theater. She said she hid her face in Michael's sleeve when it got too scary, peeking out to check when it was safe to watch again. She said it was a horrifying awful scary movie and she really liked it and wants to see it again. Tomorrow. :-)
As MacBeth has said in her review, it's not like the book. But the children knew that going into the movie, so they didn't really expect a true representation of their beloved book. They have seen LWW over a dozen times, and though they didn't like a lot of it at the first viewing, they got used to it. They've learned that a movie is not like a book even if it has the same name. The boys also greatly enjoy the LOTR movies. I think they see movies simply as a form of entertainment. As MacBeth also noted here, the spiritual richness and beautiful way Truth is presented in the book are omitted in the movie, but my family expected that after the LWW movie. Jonathan noted that sitting in a movie theater in front of a giant screen with a bunch of strangers eating popcorn is not a place he expects to encounter great spiritual truths. The intimacy and privacy of a book may be a more suitable venue for discovering what Lewis so delightfully presents to us through his Chronicles. But we don't watch many movies. I find it ironic that in this interview director Andrew Adamson states, "I've decided not to use these films as a platform or springboard for my own beliefs. I was very much expressing C. S. Lewis's story and allowing people to take from it whatever they took from the book." Yet he is clearly promoting his own ideas by what he has omitted from the movie. How he thinks this movie is "staying true to the book" I don't know. But that is what we've come to expect from him and from a movie.
So enjoy the great adventure film for what it is but also use it as an excuse to re-read and savor the deliciousness that is the book. Everyone here had devoured the whole familiar series before the movie and most are going through them again now. After all, no one ever wants to leave Narnia after a visit, because you never know when you will ever get to go back again.
What did you think of the movie?
