Weeks before The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opened, I had the chance to chat with some of the cast and crew, and they were all understandably anxious about how the film was going to be received. “’I love those books -- don’t screw it up,’” producer Mark Johnson said was the typical reaction to the news he was making a film adaptation of the beloved book.
I think it’s safe to say now that not too many folks think he screwed it up. The film topped the holiday box office -- movies don’t do this kind of business unless audiences are returning to see a movie twice or three times or more, and it goes without saying that people don’t see movies they don’t like more than once. And more: Geeks, in my anecdotal experience and observation, go to the movies a lot, much more often than the average nongeeky moviegoer, who might see only four or five movies in the theater each year. But any movie that achieves Narnia’s box-office success has to be one of the four or five movies the nongeeks are seeing, too -- the numbers demand it, I think, because it’s the rare geek who will see a movie a dozen times, or not, at least, this particular film. Narnia is wonderful, but it ain’t Star Wars or The Matrix. (Then again, part of the hilarilous appeal of the Narnia white-boy rap “Lazy Sunday” that appeared on the mostly irrelevant Saturday Night Live recently may be that it does touch on how deeply we geeks are moved by the film.)
Of course, mainstream audiences have been primed, now, for epic fantasy, by Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. The 800-pound gorilla of LOTR was something I and the other journalists who spoke to the Narnia gang were eager to talk about, in -- I’ll admit -- a way that was a little bit, well, morbid, as if we knew that it was inevitable that Lion would, in the eyes of audiences, suffer by comparison. (We journalists had already seen the film the night before and knew that it didn’t look like a ripoff of Jackson, but we’re far from ordinary moviegoers.) And the insistence of producer Johnson and director Andrew Adamson that LOTR was not a problem at all sounded a bit... not exactly desperate, but close. “We went out of our way to not look like Lord of the Rings,” Johnson explained. “We were very aware of it” as looming over everything they were doing. Adamson, on the other hand, insisted he was never worried about the Tolkien trilogy at all -- that the fact that it existed cinematically and had done so well was a benefit: “Ten years ago no one would have expected to adapt a piece of classic English literature” like C.S. Lewis’s... and then came Peter Jackson.
But it seems that perhaps Adamson was right: Just as Star Wars trained audiences to watch fast space battles and hang out with weird alien creatures and so paved the way for a new subgenre of film, it may be that LOTR has done that for big, bloody epic fantasy, journeys through magical lands, and pseudo-religious undertones. (Though, as Adamson was careful to note, there’s “no blood at all in our battle scenes” -- and damn if there isn’t.) There will certainly be completely crappy “epic” “fantasies” attempting to cash in on the Tolkien craze -- though perhaps now we should call it the Tolkien/Lewis -- but we haven’t gotten there yet.
Still, it’s always about geeky cool stuff, isn’t it? Adamson is a major geek: he directed Shrek and Shrek 2 and laments his loss of total control over all aspects of filmmaking with his move to at least partial live action -- “the biggest challenge was the weather; in animation, you don’t have to worry about the weather.” He “grew up with these books,” as did many of the adult fans of his film, and explains partly why so many grownups are getting so sucked in by this story, which is far more simplistic story that Tolkien’s. And maybe this’ll be the movie that inspires a whole new generation of kids to take up the geeky mantle. As 18-year-old Will Moseley, who plays the eldest Pevensie child, Peter, said, not only about his character’s reaction but his own response as a kid getting to play around on the set: “Wow -- my own sword!” Who in the audience who fantasized of adventure and excitement as a child -- or as a grownup -- can’t empathize with that? And the whole package deal here in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is, as little Georgie Henley, who plays Lucy, explained: “Extra extra extra wow.”
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