- Released: 10 December 2010
- Directed by: Micheal Apted
- Running time: 1 h 53 min
- Rating 3/5
Synopsis
Lucy and Edmund, alongside their discontent cousin Eustace, are swept away to Narnia once more as they go on a seafaring adventure and must solve a mystery involving magical dark mists and missing lords.My Thoughts
It's really been over a year since my last Narnia review? Oh dear. I've held off from reviewing this one for such a long time for a reason, however. The reason is simple: I don't really like this movie.
The first two films in the franchise are varying between good (Prince Caspian) and really good (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) in my opinion. I like watching both of these when I want to get my nostalgic fantasy fix. But this one? It is my least favorite by far. All things considered this still isn't a godawful movie or anything, it's decent. But I really can't give it more than that, which is such as shame when the first two were pretty darn strong movies.
My main gripe with this movie: I find it to be very boring. I don't care much for the characters or their conflicts here. Edmund has once more become a jerk, Lucy's only conflict is regarding something as minimal as looking good (remember this is an entire magical mystery involving many presumed deaths we're dealing with. And yet all she wants to do is look like Susan), Caspian is mostly just there and once every often gets a conflict with Edmund.
The only characters in this I genuinely ended up liking are, ironically enough, Eustace and Reepicheep. Which is funny because Eustace is purposefully written to be as unlikable as possible in the first part of the movie. But he gradually gets better as he gets adjusted to Narnia and bonds with Reepicheep. Then he accidentally ends up turned into a dragon and now really must face his fears. This is good character development I like to see. Reep meanwhile I really didn't like the second movie, but here he's pretty okay. I'd much rather see these two bond rather than Edmund squabbling with Caspian or Lucy wanting to be prettier.
The journey in this is also really boring and too vague if you ask me. We know there's a magical mist and it's connected to the missing lords and their swords. But overall this is such a vague concept of a conflict, especially when the resolution is nothing memorable. I'd much rather we have to fight another bad guy such as Jadis or the villain from Caspian (forgot his name) rather than this abstract concept of an antagonistic force.
The stakes also felt way lower in this movie. The pace feels slow and because the conflict is pretty vague and mostly shows itself in smaller ways (altering the mind of certain people for the negative), the stakes feel lower. Here, there's only a few islands that are being terrorized by the smoke. Compare that to movies one and two where the main conflict was all of Narnia being at stake of being overtaken by a tyrant.
Another weird question I have for this movie that may or have not been answered in the books: where are all these new humans in Narnia coming from? By movie two, only the Telmarines inhabited mainland Narnia, and they have a very specific look to them (light to slightly tan skin with dark hair and eyes).
Meanwhile in this movie there's also many island-dwelling humans who look way more varying. So either these aren't Telmarines at all, which would mean that somehow more non-Telmarine humans got into Narnia and colonized their islands, or they retconned the standard Telmarine look and moved some of their population to the islands. I'm all for more diversity in movies, don't get me wrong, so I'm happy to see a more varied assortment of humans here, but I kind of wish that they'd thought of more representation back when they were making movie two so this doesn't come out of left field.
Also, this might've been explained in the books again and was also an issue I had for Caspian, but I'm still slightly weirded out by somehow more humans being able to access Narnia other than the chosen children (the Pevensies and Eustace, especially the former). The whole point of the first movie was that there were no humans in Narnia, only magical creatures, so their coming was foretold in a prophecy and them being human was what made them special and part of the prophecy. So to see that by movies two and three pretty much our entire cast, including Narnians, is now human is not only disappointing for the fantastical-creature fans like me, but also just kind of jarring. Again, the books might cover it, but it's never well-explained in the movies how all the Telmarines ended up in Narnia.
A last thing I wanted to bring up in this movie: they redesigned Aslan, and he does not look as good as before. I don't get why they even did this; if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? He does look decent but his new design just looks jarringly different and like a downgrade from the Aslan in movies one and two. It kind of looks more like a generic lion and less like a character that radiates a personality, at least to me. A bit less expressive and all. It's still not a bad design nor bad CGI, but when they already have a perfectly fine Aslan model from the first two movies I don't get why they'd redesign him.
Overall I just consider this movie to be mid. It's not bad, but by Narnia standards it definitely is a far cry from the first and second movies. See you when The Silver Chair comes out (aka never, that film has been stuck in development hell for years now).
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