The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Meh

 3/10

       I had totally forgotten that this movie had already come out let alone was still gonna be made.  Very little advertising has been put towards selling this movie this season.  It is almost as if the movie was never meant to exist.  Which is pretty much how I felt after leaving this bland and forgettable movie.  Albeit, I don’t want to be too hard on it, since it was still tolerable and far and away better than most of the other family fantasy movies this year (I’m looking at you Prince of Persia).  

     Technically, this movie wasn’t supposed to exist on any level.  The first two Narnia films were helmed by the Disney company.  They later decided to cease production on any more Narnia movies since it was not working financially in their favour.  So the Dawn Treader sat in limbo for half a year until 20th Century Fox took up the project and hashed out this movie in time for the holidays.   

     If I could use one word to describe this movie, it would be ‘meh’.  Certainly the lack of Disney influence sucked the magic and enjoyability out of the film.  It just seemed to be devoid of interest.  The first two films were fairly good.  In fact I rather enjoyed the second one, Prince Caspian, thoroughly.  It was a really cool dark fantasy, and it’s a shame that no one saw it because it was released at the same time as Iron Man and the insufferable Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull [ughhh... it even pains me to write out that title].  

   All three of the lead children in this movie were dull and Caspian himself was relegated to having nothing important to say or do.  And it’s probably due to the nature of the book, but there was barely any cool talking animals and the plot was useless. Something to do with aimlessly searching for 7 dead guys.

   What irks me most though, is the cheesy ending.  I realize the books of this series are heavily ornamented in Christianity and I have no problem with that, in fact, I’m certain that is the main factor to the longevity of these stories.  This didn’t bother me at all in the first two movies, the symbolism was handled well.  But the end of this movie was just so ham-fisted in it’s approach that you could hear ‘moans’ and ‘snickering’ from the audience in the theater.  The point didn’t need to be hammered home as much as it was.  

   However, there was an awesome ‘final-monster-bad-guy’ at the end, but that doesn’t save a movie.  In fact, just watch the Kraken fight in the second Pirates movie to get a better version.  And since this is a series, I’m most likely going to be watching each of the next 2 or 3 Narnia movies. Who knows, they might get better?  After all, this was one of the weaker novels in the collection.

         Boy, Aslan sure does look fuzzy and I want to hug him.

Summary: It’s forgettable, has a plot that no one seems to care about and some annoying borderline ugly children; but at least there’s magic and special effects while still being tolerable. I have it ranked at #859 of the 1391 movies I’ve seen [on flickchart.com].