"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Friday, June 30, 2017

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010, PG)

This was the only film in the Narnia series that I didn’t catch the first time around – just never got around to it.  Seeing it now, I’d say I liked it for the most part.  While The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian have sort of complementary pros and cons, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader might fall somewhere in between both for me.  This is a series that, in my opinion, doesn’t have any real clear delineations of rank; each film has its own strengths and stumbles.

Stuck in the country with their insufferable cousin Eustace, Edmund and Lucy are thrilled to find themselves transported to Narnia once more (less thrilled to do so with Eustace in tow.)  There, they meet up again with Caspian, now king of Narnia and leading a sailing expedition to seek out a number of lords who’d been forced to flee during Caspian’s uncle’s usurpation.  Along the way, they have a number of strange and fantastical adventures, and they also discover a malevolent force that seems to have infected many of the islands to which they travel.

Right off the bat, I’ll admit that, while I remember a lot of the individual adventure vignettes from the book (the golden statue, the Duffelpuds, the dragon, the edge of the world,) I don’t remember a thing about a green mist and it all tying together leading to a final climactic battle against this intangible evil power.  It’s been far too long since I’ve read the book to remember if that’s the driving plot of the story or if that’s something the movie came up with, but I’m leaning toward the latter.  I seem to recall no unifying thread between the different island stories, more a series of individual adventures in the vein of Gulliver’s Travels or The Odyssey, but I could be wrong.  I do know there’s other stuff that gets changed here in a big way, and as with Prince Caspian, I personally think most of it is change for the better.  Like the previous film, it also touches more on some interesting theme stuff that I don't believe was explored too much in the book.  Though I think Prince Caspian is still the richest in that regard, this film pulls out some neat character points – chiefly, it does a more thorough job of setting up Lucy’s sense of inferiority compared to Susan and gives her a small arc related to this, and it explores Edmund not quite knowing where he fits with Caspian and still feeling like he’s living in the shadow of Peter’s reign (side note:  both of the latter movies continue to examine, in small ways, the lingering effects of Edmund’s dealings with the White Witch in the first film, which I like.)

It’s a tricky film, because the individual vignettes are mostly all pretty fun and well-adapted but the unifying thread (whether it was invented by the screenwriters or came from the original book) is fairly weak, culminating in probably the most generic-feeling climax of the series.  And other than Edmund, Lucy, and the newly added Eustace, the only real major characters of note are Caspian and Reepicheep, both of whom I like, but on a boat filled with characters, most of them feel pretty nameless and faceless.  That said, the holdover cast members from the previous film(s) continue to do well – I’m impressed with both Georgie Henley and Skyler Keynes as the two Pevensies, and although Caspian’s inexplicably changed his accent since we last saw him, Ben Barnes still does a nice job with the character.  Will Poulter (who more recently played Gally in The Maze Runner) is a fine Eustace, thoroughly unpleasant and yet just redeemable enough, and I really enjoy Simon Pegg’s take on Reepicheep after Eddie Izzard’s portrayal in Prince Caspian.

Warnings

Disney violence, scary moments for kids, and brief thematic elements.

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