New Prince Caspian Trailer

Thanks for posting the trailer. Now I have my excuse for not seeing the movie. The more they try to make Lewis cool, hip, & relevant, not to mention action packed, the worse it gets.

reyhan,

I won’t even go into Reepicheep with you, but as for Caspian speaking with a Spanish like accent, I think maybe the director is going by the fact that the Telmarines were formerly pirates. Of course, the most famous pirates were the English!

Someone’s going to have to enlighten me: what was wrong with the film version of LWW? The linked site talks about Aslan not seeeming regal enough, and the enemy (ie. the White Witch and her troops) not seeming fearful enough in his presence.

I’m not sure how much more regal you can get than Liam Neeson. And the lion looked about as regal as you could get an animal with limited facial expressions to look.

And as it so happens, we were watching the sacrifice scene just the othe day. I was paying close attention to Swinton, having found her performance in Michael Clayton fascinating. At no point does she look “fearless”. In fact, she gives a very good impression of someone who is shocked at her own daring, balanced finely between triumph and terror. She is not your average megalomaniacal movie villain, drunk on his own power and importance. This White Witch knows she’s messing with something that is dangerous.

How indeed, revgeorge?

I Googled it and found:

“The two films – the second of which will cover the 60 years between J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring – will be shot back to back.”

It sounds like all the exposition at the start of the Fellowship will be shown on film. Which is not an idea entirely without merit.

It’s been a while since I read FotR cover to cover. What are the things that happen in that interval? This is what I remember:

Aragorn visits the Kingdoms of Middle Earth – goes incognito to Minas Tirith and also spends some time in Theoden’s court, I believe. Gollum goes to Mordor and back out again (I think) He’s captured by some elves. The dwarves go back to Moria and start mining mithril, and get slaughtered by the Balrog.

Good stuff. There’s no dialogue, of course, so someone will have to take a stab at how Tolkien might have written it. And it might be a wee bit challenging to keep a narrative thread going. Who are they going to focus on: Aragorn? Gollum? Balin and whoever went with him to Moria? Gandalf as well, because he was trying to track down the history of Bilbo’s ring around that time, as I recall. So they’ll probably keep three or four narrative threads going.

It’ll be tricky, because there is no natural resolution at the end.

Also, casting should be interesting. Ian McKellan for Gandalf, one supposes. But will Viggo Mortensen come back for Aragorn? And he’ll be 58 in 2010. A bit long in the tooth for the younger Aragorn (unless they intend to depict him as ageless, as per Gandalf).

Like I said, it will be interesting. And I’m actually kind of looking forward to it. And purists should be a little easier with Hobbit Part 2 because there isn’t a very strict canon to butcher.

I just read the Greydanus review. It’s not badly done, actually, and makes its points well and without the usual attempts to be witty.

The criticism comes down to three things: Peter is not resolute enough as a leader, Aslan doesn’t get enough respect, and the director doesn’t linger long enough on events which are of huge symbolic significance.

For me, these objections come down to the critic’s feeling that Adamson (the director) just didn’t have the right reverential attitude towards the book in general, and Aslan in particular. Looking at Aslan as the Christ figure, this criticism sort of makes sense.

But looking at it from the perspective of someone who has reservations about the book, I think the criticisms are misplaced. First of all, a lot of the power imbalance between the lion and the witch in the movie comes down to the fact that one is human and the other is a – lion. Neeson does the best he can with his voice, but Swinton has all the advantages of being able to act with her eyes and gestures and movements. And I don’t even blame the lion. He seems to be an outstanding member of his species, CGI or not, but pathos and passion are outside of his range. I think Lewis did not choose well to introduce beavers and wolves and lions as major speaking roles into his story. The animals just do not have the same emotional impact as humans do.

Now Lewis wrote in the reverence, respect and awe which Aslan evoked from the other characters. But I am reminded of the infamous lines of Harrison Ford to George Lucas: “George, you can type this s%$*, but you can’t say it.” Did Lewis actually think what it would look and sound like to have people adoring and revering a lion? In our world, lions are zoo animals, or endangered predators. It is too far a reach to see one as the Saviour.

His excuse, of course, was that he didn’t think his lines would ever be spoken, or filmed.

But the question still remains: why didn’t he make Aslan human? That would have made him much more accessible as well as believable. And wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense to make Christ – human?

I think it’s more than quite possible it could never work on the screen. It doesn’t work on screeen period. Especially in our day & age when directors feel that their vision of the story is way more important than the story itself.

As for Aslan being a semblance of a zoo animal or predator, well, back in Lewis’ day, lions were still seen as the King of the Jungle, strong, noble, fearsome, ruling everything with a watchful eye. Can lions help it if that image has been torn down by our modernist & postmodernist deconstruction?

What do encounters with Christ look like?

Now there is a question that could fire the imagination.

In the Odyssey, the goddess Athena appears to Odysseus as a shepherd boy. In the television show Brimstone, both God and the Devil have the same face. In the television show St. Elsewhere, God appears to the Howie Mandel character as – himself. In the movie Bedazzled God appears to the Brendan Fraser character as a nameless man in a jail cell.

And of course there is the man who listens to the Grand Inquisitor’s tortured rantings silently, and then gives him – a kiss.

I am moved by all of these encounters, but the lion doesn’t do it for me.

Travis,

I think Aslan works better in text than on screen. In text, we get the full impact of Lewis’ prose, which is what makes Aslan great. We also hear that he is a lion, but we are not confronted with the full physical reality, just the bits that reinforced the power and majesty.

On screen, on the other hand, we see the lion. I must confess, for many of the scenes I was wondering about the animal trainers, how they got the lion to do the various moves, and how much it was a real lion and how much CGI. It was distracting, and the lion on screen was disembodied from the voice. And of coure, we also missed out on Lewis’ powerful prose.

There is actually a lot of Narnia that works on screen: I was enchanted by the forest, the White Queen’s sled, her palace, Mr. Tumnus and his house, the snow, Father Christmas, the petrified creatures in the Witch’s palace grounds. And for some reason, the wolves kind of worked, although they still felt disembodied.

Conversely, the animals did work for me in text, even or rather especially, Aslan. (Well, the beavers didn’t work, but that’s a small quibble.) My point is, the words conveyed his power, and the love, respect and awe that he inspired. Must admit, very little of that showed up on screen. The closest it got to that was Lucy’s obvious love for him.

Perhaps I missed something in all the previous discussion, but I’m a little confused. Why is the lion not a good representation of Christ? The Bible frequently refers to Christ as the Lion of Judah. That seems like a really obvious choice for Lewis to use once he decided to have all the inhabitants of Narnia be talking animals.
If you decide to just make everyone human, you take away one of the major plot points, which is that the kids stand out so thoroughly because they are Human in an animal world.
Not necessarily defending the movie. I have found that the more I watch it, the more it grows on me, which often happens with me. I do wish that they chose a director that had a better grasp of the intense symbolic imagery that Lewis used. The whole death and resurrection of Aslan was missing the emotional impact I expected from a scene that is the foundation for all of Christianity.

Scott,

I think that for me the underlying problem about the movie is something they had no control over: Lewis’ decision to make some of the inhabitants of Narnia animals, while the others are dwarves and fauns and giants and centaurs (and other mythological creatures), and one human – the White Witch. The creatures that at least have a human face and limbs are more emotionally accessible than the ones that don’t. In some ways it would have worked better if all the creatures had been animals, so as to create a “level playing field”.

As for the lion symbolism associated with Christ, there are many different ways of working the symbolism into a character without having the character actually “be” a lion. Golden hair, a lion badge or pendant, references to lions, pictures of lions stalking or posing in the background, lion motifs on clothing, lion insignia on flags and banners, places named after lions, etc. etc.

I’m not suggesting that Lewis should have chosen differently – only that his choice, while working better on the page, doesn’t work as well, for me, on the screen.

But I wonder, why give a human form to the White Witch, and not Aslan? What’s up with that?

As for the “romp”: you can’t be awe inspiring and regal and terrible in a beautiful way and be playful at the same time. It’s incongrous.

I think, in terms of the use of talking animals and such, you have to remember that Lewis was intentionally writing a children’s fantasy. If he had just made everyone human it would have lost some of the magic and wonder. It would have just been a fictional allegory and might not have been so appealing to children.
Maybe this is just a British thing, I don’t know. They seem to have a strong sense that “fairy stories” need to have fantastic otherworldly creatures, not just boring old humans. JKR did this. Tolkien did this. Seems like a lot of British authors do this. Or maybe I just don’t get out enough…
As far as Aslan’s romp with the girls, I liked it in the stories. I think Christ sometimes spent time with his disciples just having fun. They went to a wedding, which is generally pretty fun. Mine was, anyway. I believe God created humor, so He has a great sense of humor. In portraying Christ in a fantasy allegory, Lewis chose a majestic Lion. He also pointed out often in the books that the lion Aslan was still a wild untamed creature who was not constrained by anyone or anything. I liked seeing the playful side come out and have a good romp with his close friends.
Just my opinion.

Scott, actually C.S. Lewis referred to his Narnia books not as allegories, but as “supposals”. Responding to a question from a school class, Lewis wrote:

I did not say to myself, “Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia”: I said, “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.”

Reyhan, I disagree. According to his enemies, Aslan can be terrible; to his followers, Aslan can be regal; and to the Pevensie children who see him for the first time, he can be awe inspiring and even playful at certain times.

I am reminded of Walt Whitman:

‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.’

If Whitman can contradict himself, so presumably can the Son of God.

About the distinction between an allegory and a supposal, another poet comes to mind:

‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’
William Shakespeare

Or somewhat less elegantly: it it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a a duck …