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Huh. Kind of an uneven movie, I felt. The book was better — it always is — but, though it had some quite good bits, the film felt rather too much like the people in charge saw the the Lord of the Rings movies (and The Matrix, and a bunch of others) and thought, “Hey, we could do that! Let’s find another classic fantasy and rip off — er, do an homage to those films. Yeah, that’s it. How about Lewis? He’s dead, right? So he can’t sue.”

Well, it wasn’t as bad as that, actually. The battle was, predictably, way overdone and preposterously referential. The soundtrack was honestly a little too obviously manipulative. The professor felt like he’d been jerked out of a Lemony Snickets book. There were bits that just fell flat — usually the humor someone had decided to try to inject in scenes that weren’t meant to be funny at all. And Aslan was just a big lion, nothing special. On the other hand, there were some good points.

I thought the kids were actually pretty great. Lucy in particular was well cast, and I think the girl playing Susan was terrific — you could totally see her growing up to be the way she turned out in The Last Battle. I didn’t feel Edmund got as much development as the others, primarily because they cut the captivity scenes almost completely out of the movie, but I thought his early selfishness seemed appropriately done, more thoughtless and short-sighted than actually mean.

The boy playing Peter actually made him more interesting to me than he was in the book — I always found Book Peter to be a bit priggish and goody-two-shoes, but he seemed more complex and torn in the film. My main problem with him, which probably should rather be blamed on the director, is that he kept pointing swords at the bad guys with his arm fully extended. It’s a freakin’ sword, not a gun. If the wolf lunges at you and you’ve got your arm fully extended, how exactly do you expect to defend yourself — by flicking your wrist? There would be practically no force behind the little swing you could get, and your response time would be way too slow. You’d get much better power and control holding your sword with your arm bent and only partially extended (more like in fencing), I should think. Maybe fencing with broadswords is different from fencing with epees, though.

The Beavers, and particularly Mrs. Beaver (voiced by the great Dawn French), were a rare instance of humor that didn’t feel forced or flat to me. But, then, I may be biased.

The guy playing Mr. Tumnus was actually quite good, I thought (and kind of cute, actually), and all the fauns’ special effects were rather impressive. (Sadly, some of the other effects — e.g., the Talking Wolves — were just too obvious.) My only real problem with Tumnus was that he was just too tall. In the book (bottom of p. 7 in the 1970 Collier Books edition), “He was only a little taller than Lucy herself.” In the film, he’s played by a young man, fully grown. This gives an entirely different, and very uncomfortable, feel to the scene when they meet and he asks Lucy to tea. The entire time, a little voice in my head was shrieking, “Pedophile! Pedophile! Aiiiiiieeee! You don’t go with strange men, Lucy!” and that certainly never happened when I was reading the book.

The costuming, particularly for the wartime England bits, was phenomenal. Maybe it was just because I’d been to the Imperial War Museum’s exhibit The Children’s War this summer (and, quite frankly, spent most of the visit tearing up), but the scenes establishing that it was wartime and the kids were being evacuated were, to me, the most moving bits of the film and actually quite scary/sad.

At the time, Jadis seemed kind of flat, but on reflection I kind of think her behavior was appropriate. After all, she is not, strictly speaking, human, and practically immortal as well (if I recall, she was awoken in the dying world Charn in The Magician’s Nephew, shortly before Narnia was created), so her cold demeanor was probably an intentional choice. The Vaseline on her eyelids bothers me more now, actually.

One final gripe, not specific to this movie but just a general fantasy movie whinge: it just seems silly to design centaurs who are so aerodynamically unsuitable for running. One would’ve thought that they would be able to lean forward when running at top speed, to reduce wind resistance. Or at least lean back, or something. Instead, we’ve always got ramrod-straight spines on all the centaurs, wind resistance and logic be damned.