Saw The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (LWW). Sucked.
That's to be expected, right? After all, I'm one of those Godless Atheists your mother, your priest, your politician, and even your butcher warned you about. I'm also a Hollywood screenwriter, one of those lonely souls forever cursed to infest sugar-stained seats scattered aside coffee-shop outlets, begging to be produced.
Put that together and I'm the poster-boy for the Downfall of Western society, the corruption of our Youth, and tooth decay. Or at least that's what my butcher says.
So let's begin....
My lack of a belief in Super Santa Clauses has nothing to do with my dislike for LWW. (I wish it did.) I remember reading the Narnia books as a young kid - or at least I think I do. I also remember being visited by space aliens who sang Abba tunes while dressed in drag - I was a queer young kid - and being pretty taken with the story: evil witches, magic wardrobes, talking animals, Aslan. I have an even better memory of the 1979 CTV animated film of LWW - the shaving of Aslan is particularly horrific in my mind - and the later BBC "muppety" production. Those were cool takes, told well to my young adult eyes.
Alas, this take is not.
Whose @#$#$!!!@ Story Is It?
Simply, the key problem with the film is that there's no main character. It's a jumbled mess of shifting focus from one Pevensie child to Aslan to another Pevensie child to Aslan to yet another Pevensie child and so on. As it never picked one character's journey to follow and then built the other characters' around that, there was no journey for me to follow, and the whole movie fell apart.
The tricky part of screenplays (and the movies made from them) is that no matter how many characters you feature and how many story-lines you undertake to tell across those pages and frames, essentially a movie is about one character and what happens to them. Everything else is secondary to that one main journey. With a central character, things happen in a film because of what that character does. They make the choices that set into motion a series of events - the movie we see. Most of the time these events force that character to change, usually for the better (though there are great films where the opposite happens,) often even altering the world around them in some fundamental way in the process.
Article comments
1 - Bliffle
Ahhh good. Another movie I don't have to see.