Apr. 24, 2003 - 7:24 pm
when my mom and i were at Best Buy last week buying The Prisoner (1967) box set for me with my leftover gift certificates, i also noticed this box set of The Chronicles of Narnia. i remembered that i started to read this, the first book of 3, in my childhood. so i though, that's awesome that they made this. of course it's the BBC, so i had some apprehensiveness about it. they tend to screw up things that are filmed for tv. they have terrible film quality, cinematography, and they have extraordinarily stagnant and badly decorated sets. that pretty much sums up my complaints about this film. well, and it was kind of goofy.
if you haven't seen this or read the C. S. Lewis children's books, i'll explain what the first book is about. four British brothers and sisters go to stay at an estate in the 1940s in order to escape the horrors of WWII. while playing hide and seek one afternoon they discover that in the upstairs wardrobe there is a doorway that leads to a magical land called Narnia. while there, they have to help save the world from an evil ice queen with the help of many talking animals including the king of the land, Aslan who is a huge talking lion. it's pretty interesting because of all of its hidden religious symbolism.
the BBC didn't do this correctly. i've listed most of my complaints already about the film. the story is intact (i believe) and the movie was fairly lengthy which is good for fantasy films. but basically while watching this, Leslie and Clay and I tore it apart with insults and jokes. it's just got some really stupid aspects. the costumes are also idiotic. i mean in the original story, talking animals are just talking animals. they are not humans in bad animal costumes. i guess we get spoiled with all of the cgi abilities of today's films and filmmakers, but a production of this made today with a big budget and cgi would completely destroy this version. hopefully the second film in the series will be better. i can't imagine it being a lot worse.