Fox 2000 Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Walden Media
Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, Ben Barnes, Will Poulter, Gary Sweet, Terry Norris, Bruce Spence, Bille Brown, Laura Brent, Tilda Swinton
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the 3rd in the Walden Media series from The Chronicles of Narnia. As this opens, Susan and Peter have grown too old to make it back to Narnia, but as the younger siblings Lucy and Edmund are living with a very annoying cousin Eustace, the notice a picture of the ocean on the wall. There is a little ship on the ocean that wasn’t there before. Suddenly the picture starts to move and as Eustace pulls it down off the wall, the water pours out of the picture flooding the room. The next thing they know, they are swimming in the ocean and Eustace is with them. They are rescued by the ship which turns out to be the Dawn Treader and captained by none other than Prince Caspian who is now a king. He is off on a quest to find out the 7 leaders of the council who have disappeared. It turns out that a dreadful evil is taking over the land, and the only way to defeat it is to find the seven swords of the seven Lords and place them on Aslan’s table. Battle after battle from evil from island to island until finally the last stand.
The third installment of the Chronicles of Narnia took a lot of heat for being the least true to the novel. Many things are changed for different reasons and I don’t know that it’s fair to blame them for a lot of the changes which seem to be necessary. Some things that work in the book would not play so well in a theater. Going from island to island to island would get tedious after a while, so a lot of these things were combined and condensed for the film. It’s been a long time since I read the novels, so I’m not going to try to analyze the differences because my memory isn’t that great anymore. 🙂 But even then, a lot of it seems smaller and less spectacular in this film. than from the earlier films. Though it was beautiful and exiting at some points, a lot of it was underwhelming. I viewed the film in 3-D which also was kind of a disappointment. After a few minutes you completely forget you are watching in 3D and there is very little added by the 3D technology. I paid $16.00 per ticket for this film, and it hurts when you are underwhelmed by the whole experience. As much as I wanted to enjoy the movie, there was a gnawing feeling deep inside that maybe I was being ripped off a little bit. Technically it’s superior. The sound is excellent, and the visual is stunning. The failure and redemption of Eustace is funny as well. He is so annoying through the first part of the film that when he gets his in the middle, everyone is relieved. But he comes back strong and very repentant for his bad behavior, and of course it is his time for Narnia in the following stories and Lucy and Edmond have now become too old to come back again. The religious ties are very “in your face” obvious, but this is no surprise for anyone who followed the books. That message is the purpose for the books in the first place and is certainly obvious but not unexpected.
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