The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Ok, don’t have much to post about recently since all the happenings are entirely on a personal matter, which I don’t think people would really care to read about hehehe.

I’ve been watching a ton of stuff recently though – But I felt that I needed to post to warn people from watching Disneys’ take on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Simply put the movie was awful. The effects alone was the only good part in this movie, but as we’re already well into a time where special effects is commonplace, you really need more than that to make a film good.

Just for the record, I may be a little biased to begin with, since among all the books of the Narnian Chronicles ¹ A 7-book collection of the world of Narnia, the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is one of them., The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe (LWATW) was the story I least liked. Sure it had a parallelism to Christ’s sacrifice which made it a favorite show for the religious communities to cash-in during the Christmas season, but ultimately, it’s still the lousiest book and story of all the Chronicles… and it annoys me to this day that they still choose that story over the others simply because of its religious implications. If you get to read The Chronicles of Narnia, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

What really did it for me was that Trumpets’ ² Trumpets is a Christian Theater Group in the Philippines. adaptation of the LWATW, though the set design was the best I’ve seen in Philippine Theater, but the play frankly sucked. Not even the set design, or Mr. Audie Gemora as Aslan could save an inherently lousy script.

Here’s a dialog that I distinctly heard from the play which stuck to me. It was when Aslan ressurected and was trying to clarify to the girls that there was something superior to the law of Deep Magic.

Aslan: … Deeper Magic. Girls: Deeper Magic!? Aslan: Yes… much deeper than Deep Magic!

DUH!!!!!

And that folks, was what ruined The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe for me. At least in the Philippine setting.

Now the book, as far as I recall (and the movie for that matter), had none of those stupid lines, but that didn’t make it an exception. Lousy acting, compounded with the fact that it was such a cheesy adaptation to begin with, made the movie comedic at best – you can’t help but make side comments during the film because it was really so pathetic.

I guess for now, the most articulate word I can use to describe is “contrived” – and that’s just because cheesy wasn’t cutting it.

My girlfriend is a huge Narnia fan, that despite my opinion on the LWATW, seeing the trailer alone was enough to get her excited. Suffice to say that even she was disappointed in the movie. So believe me when I say it’s bad.