(ABP) — Lights! Camera! Allegory?
Whether viewers find a distinctly Christian message in the new movie “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” depends on whether they found one in the C.S. Lewis fantasy novel it's based on, the movie's creators insist.
“The film is the book,” said Micheal Flaherty, president of Walden Media, the company that partnered with Walt Disney to make the movie. “We wanted to make sure that we successfully captured everything that was there in the book,” Flaherty explained.
“[For] all the reasons Christians love the book, they're going to love the film as well,” Flaherty said. “This is something that's going to be universally adored.”
The new movie is the first of the seven novels in Lewis' Narnia series for Walden to translate to the big screen.
A professor of literature at Oxford and Cambridge, Lewis came to faith as an adult, then became one of the 20th century's most eloquent defenders of Christianity. In addition to the Narnia series and a trilogy of science-fiction novels, Lewis authored “Mere Christianity” and other books and essays arguing for the reasonableness of believing.
Walden's mission is to encourage young people to read by making quality adaptations of widely acknowledged master works of children's literature. The latest film comes on the heels of Walden's “Because of Winn Dixie” last winter and the 2003 “Holes.” Next up for Walden is “Charlotte's Web,” anticipated for release in 2006.
Scholars debate the overtness of Christian themes in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” as well as the other Narnia books. “Lewis was a Christian, and his story treats events that are central to Christianity,” said Alan Jacobs, professor of English at Illinois' Wheaton College. “But you do not have to see and understand the Christian message to enjoy the story,” added Jacobs, author of “The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis.”
Like its textual source, the movie tells the story of the Pevensie children — two boys, two girls — sent to live in the English countryside in World War II to escape the London Blitz. Bored guests in the home of an old professor, the children accidentally discover that, brushing aside the clothes in a wooden wardrobe, they can magically enter a mythical world called Narnia.
As war rages in the nation they leave on the other side of the wardrobe, the Pevensie kids find themselves swept into yet another epic struggle inside Narnia, whose creatures groan and shiver under the domination of a witch who has usurped the throne and frozen the land in an unending winter. Their participation in Narnia's drama will test the family of four children as they battle foes from without and betrayal from within.
And “epic” is the operative word for the new screen version of Lewis' beloved novel.
Even before opening credits, the film visually wafts the audience inside the menacing German bombers over London that release their deadly payloads on the civilians below. To escape the nightly attacks, the Pevensie children, like hundreds of their young countrymen, must board crowded trains to flee the savage raids on the British capital.
The dramatic scenes in London yield to panoramas of Narnia as the children traverse frozen landscapes to escape the forces of the false queen. The sweeping views of the icy countryside, followed later in the story with dazzling battle scenes between the forces of good and the army of the usurper, help explain the frequent comparisons between “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. New Zealand provided locations for both productions.
The new movie's director, Andrew Adamson, underscored the large-scale perspective he attempted to give the film version of Lewis' novel.
“This is the story about four kids, disempowered by the war in their own world, World War II, who enter this land where they're not only empowered but they're ultimately the only solution to war in that land,” Adamson writes in a Walden Media educator's guide to the movie. “We're taking the story of a family, and exaggerating it to the level of the battle between good and evil,” he added.
Accompanying the heroic fight for justice on the battlefield in the Lewis tale is another key theme, experts say — the power of redemptive sacrifice.
“It's really a twofold story: the rightful king of Narnia returns to re-establish his kingdom and bring peace; and that same king sacrifices himself to save a traitor,” said Wheaton's Jacobs. “So kingdom and salvation are what the story is all about.”
In the movie, the good laws of Narnia cannot ignore wrongdoing. Betrayal demands justice, and justice a penalty. But the price can be paid by someone willing to die in a wrongdoer's stead.
And in the magical world of Narnia, death itself is powerless against unselfish love. “The deeper magic is all about redemption, it's all about reconciliation, it's all about healing, and it's all about . . . death being swallowed up in victory,” said Stanley Mattson, president of the Redlands, Calif.-based C.S. Lewis Foundation.
Mattson added, “The film just has an extraordinary range of messages that deal with . . . how we are to engage evil in ways that really are redemptive and ultimately promise victory in the best sense of that word.”