If you lost track of what was going on with the Narnia movie series, welcome to the club. The last one they made was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which they bollixed up but good. Then it was going to be The Silver Chair–then, no, wait, we’re gonna do The Magician’s Nephew instead–and then back to The Silver Chair, which seems to be the one they’ve finally decided on.
All the corporate this-and-thatting took up so much time that the children cast in the first three films are now adults and have to be replaced. So we’ve lost Will Poulter’s “Eustace,” which was the best thing about Dawn Treader. At the rate they’re going with these movies, maybe he could play Father Time.
I root for these movies to succeed, in spite of the first three falling way short of the old BBC TV series from the 1980s. At no time did the movie-makers fail to succumb to the temptation to jazz up the stories, improve on C.S. Lewis by a plethora of Politically Correct touch-ups–I really hated it when they turned Lucie into some kind of Xena Warrior Princess–and allow an air-head like Liam Neeson to shoot off his mouth about Aslan being Mohammed and Buddha as well as an allegory for Jesus Christ. But it would take all day to list the defects of those first three movies.
Anyhow, the franchise is under new management, they’ve put out a trailer, and supposedly The Silver Chair will be released next year–and we shall see what we shall see.
Just, please, someone tell me that the voice speaking the Witch’s lines in the trailer is not going to play the Witch in the movie.