Sometimes a people or army just need a rallying point. This is even true IRL.
Wallace was no one important but he acted as a rallying point for the Scots.
Brian Boru of Ireland was able to get many unfriendly petty Kingdoms to work together to fight off the Danes. Part of this ability was myths and stories that he played up of his birth and how he came to power.
Short Answer: Magic.
Long Answer:
Prince Caspian: The kids are summoned by Susan’s horn, which she left in Narnia.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: They’re drawn in through a painting.
The Silver Chair: A door in a garden wall at Eustace’s school.
The Magician’s Nephew: The yellow and green rings.
The Last Battle: Umm…
Dying in a train accident.
Saw it yesterday and really enjoyed it. I’d read the book and also saw a cartoon of it when I was younger, Mr. Bunny never had so I had to explain to him why Aslan wouldn’t just bite the head off of the White Witch when they spoke in the tent.
However, I did notice one curious plot hole which never occurred to me before (and I’ve never read any of the other Narnia books, so maybe it’s explained in one of them):
It’s mentioned that the Witch wants to kill all four of them because then the prophecy that two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve would bring about her downfall wouldn’t come true. However, could she not have just offed Edmund when she had the chance? There still wouldn’t have been four, the prophecy wouldn’t have come true, and everything else would have fallen apart, would it not?
My only real problem was that I felt that Aslan’s voice should have been much more booming, deep and fearsome. Sure he could be gentle, but wasn’t he also supposed to be terrifying and awe-inspiring? Liam Neeson just sounded way too wussy.
Oh, and the guy who played Tumnus was fantastic.
In the book she does eventually decide to kill Edmind. He hears her sharpening her knife, right before the rescue party shows up.
I remember that, but wasn’t she more or less just going to kill him for the fun of it, or because he wasn’t useful to her anymore, and not because it occurred to her that she could nip this whole prophecy thing right in the bud and just do away with one of the four instead of all of them?
NailBunny, she is planning on killing him because of the prophecy:
“Four thrones in Cair Paravel,” said the Witch. “How if only three were filled? That would not fulfill the prophecy.” - L, W & W
Now, as to why she didn’t do it sooner, I think she wanted to deal with the whole problem all at once rather than by pieces.
Also, it’s pretty clear our girl Jadis never read the Evil Overlord list.
Ha! Well there you go!
It would help if I’d read the book within the last two decades, huh? 
Many thanks, Orual --now I dont’ have to read 6 other books!
(kinda sucks about that last one…)
I did find Aslan to be somewhat remote–a wee bit too dignified. He plays with the girls (mabye they thought that would be Inappropriate for a Christian Symbol or maybe it had too many sexual overtones in this day and age) and that is where (in the book) I came to love him.
Re: the witch not handing Edmund cyanide-laced Turkish Delight:
Does the prophecy ever state that the four Sons/Daughters will be brothers and sisters? If it doesn’t, then the witch’s actions make perfect sense. She can kill this one now, or she can (successfully) play on his obvious greed and desire for power. If she kills him now, then the other three will be alerted and quickly moving against her, and nothing will stop them from bringing in a substitute king. Best to kill the lot of them, and hope like hell that no one else comes to Narnia the way they did.
At least in her first scene it looked like she had snow on them.
I really liked it. I think that they used less than a tablespoon of fake blood in the whole movie.
I can’t really add much more because it’s all been said already and because it’s been about 12 years since I’ve read the books.
Why do you hate Jesus?
That is true. In the movie a lot of stuff had to be cut/skipped/glossed over. This was probably the biggest flaw of the movie, IMHO. OTOH, I think that most people watching the movie are familiar with the books. Also, adding ~20 minutes of “getting to know and love Aslan” would have slowed down the movie and made it too long. And they couldn’t introduce Aslan earlier without seriously changing the story. So I think that they decided to keep the movie as short as possible while still hitting on all of the major points. Sometimes character development is what gets sacrificed. (no pun intended.)
I think that that plot point was blown several centuries ago. Blame the Bible, not marketing.
Bingo- that was one of the biggest flaws with the movie. Aslan fell kind of flat, which isn’t just a flaw, it’s closer to a Fatal Flaw: Aslan is supposed to be the most badass creature ever.
I was expecting the religious aspects to be played up a lot because of how it’s being marketed to christians, and I was glad that they weren’t. But I wonder if that’s why Aslan came off so weak. God forbid that someone who’s supposed to sort-of be Narnia’s version of Jesus be interesting! CS Lewis had a lot of religious views that today would be way out of the mainstream, so they wanted to make sure Aslan in the movie didn’t conflict with too many people’s ideas of God.
I saw the animated version a lot as a child, and even though it’s probably dumb, I remember it doing some parts a lot better, especially Aslan’s death. That had some impact. I mostly remember the aftermath. Blood was flowing down the table, and it mostly didn’t show his carcass so we couldn’t see the wound. Susan and Lucy were weeping, and then the rats were cooler; they were scary. They had glowing red eyes and at first it really did look like they were eating Aslan. The girls freaked out a lot more at first, until Lucy noticed they were chewing through the ropes.
Also, in the animated one I prefer the way they showed the WW summoning the turkish delight and hot chocolate. When she poured a drop of liquid onto the snow, there was a hiss and smoke and then the stuff appeared. I would prefer something like that in this movie instead of how they instead showed off what they could do with CG.
Someone said earlier that Narnia at first should have been more foreboding. I remember how as a kid I thought it was so cool and a little scary the way that the book emphasized that they weren’t safe anywhere, and that some of the trees were actually spies. Well, it could have been worse in the movie, they could have said that the spying trees were creatures that looked like trees instead of actual trees.
I actually mostly enjoyed the movie, despite the problems. Some things about it were done really well.
He was dead overnight, which really is only about 24 hours shorter that Jesus was.
The casualties didn’t know that Aslan would come back to unfreeze them. Also, I don’t know that those that were killed outright (as opposed to being petrified) were brought back to life. (Since there was no blood shown in the movie, it’s hard to know how many were “killed outright”.)
I disagree. The White Witch was a total badass, and all of the good guys that tried to taker her out …
…got petrified. Edmund broke her petrifying staff, and then Peter went toe-to-toe with her. Susan took out at least one baddie with an arrow, and Lucy healed a lot of wounded. Now, I’m not going to say that Aslan couldn’t have dealt with the WW if she had had her petrifying wand, because I don’t want to go to hell. I’m just saying that she didn’t have it when he attacked her. That’s all.
Sounds like I get to play the role of Selkie the Grump™ again. Saw it Friday, thought about it over the weekend, and don’t like it any better now than I did then (when, had I not been with someone else, I might have left out of sheer boredom). I didn’t expect to feel much for the allegory, but I was hoping to enjoy a good ripping fantasy adventure. Even on that level, the film didn’t engage me.
I’m glad the allegorical aspects weren’t toned down, because on general principle I don’t like when movies strip out layers of meaning present in the source material, but they were so bald that they were harder to ignore than I expected. The representation of pre-patriarchal religion as cold and barren strongly grated. As a pagan friend pointed out, that’s probably essential if you’re going to present a male deity as the source of fertility. Still, both the feminist and non-Christian in me rebelled at the gender depictions.
I thought the kids were, for the most part, terrible actors, particularly “A Lucy Child Shall Lead Them” who seemed to wear the same simpering expression throughout the entire film.
While the CGI was sometimes stone cold brilliant (the close-ups of Aslan), I thought an awful lot of the shots looked fake, and the parts that were great just showed up how many weren’t. Another poster upthread already mentioned the bad background effects - those jumped out at me too.
I agree with all the upthread discussion of Aslan being too remote; I know I didn’t care about him, and I knew I should. The Passion of the Lion deserved more importance (it’s one of the bits of Christianity that even I find moving), instead of the abrupt cut-away to the strangely bloodless battle. Again, I understand the “followers of Aslan never really die” meaning, but for me the lack of death, blood, and destruction undercut a lot of the inherent drama of the war.
I saw it with my parents and a whole theater of folks from our church. I thoroughly enjoyed it. My mother’s verdict on snowy Narnia–Honey, one of these years we haveto take a winter vacation and go cross-country-skiing again.
It sure does.
But Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair are all quite good, so I would recommend giving them another look.
Despite the Stonehenge-yness of the Stone Table, I really really don’t think that the White Witch and her minions are meant to be representative of “pre-patriarchal religion”. Aslan’s side has just as many mythological creatures.
Of course, I think that I’m the only pagan feminist in the whole world who really likes Lewis …
I saw it Sunday with my 9 year old son…he loved it. I found it entertaining but too geared towards kids for it to be truly engaging to me. I agree with those who found the Aslan-death-and-ressurection scene to be too abrupt. I expected more from it.
Interesting movie, interesting discussion.
I cannot but be reminded of “Serenity,” the movie based on the cult TV series Firefly, which was also hailed as a great movie by a lot of fans of, well, “Firefly.”
Like that movie, I thought LW&W was a technically impressive movie, and it wasn’t BAD, but it was predictable as all hell and not terribly engaging. I cannot help but think that the raves about it from dedicated Narnia lovers (as with the raves for “Serenity” from dedicated Firefly lovers) are half because they’re just relieved it didn’t really suck, and half because they’re determined to love it.
I’m an anti-Semite.
Probably, but I wasn’t one of them.
It may have been the best possible solution to the problem, but the result is still deeply flawed.
Or, they (Narnia and Serenity people both) could have genuinely liked it, and just had a different opinion than yours. I don’t mean to pick a fight, but the whole, “Oh, you didn’t really like it,” argument is a major peeve of mine. If someone says they liked a movie, it’s pretty arrogant to second guess them like that. Anyway, sorry, didn’t mean to hijack, just had to say that.
A a fan of both movies, I do not deny that there is probably some truth to your view. It is difficult for me to seperate my opinion of Serenity from my affection for “Firefly”, and my opinon of this movie from my affection for the books. It’s the same for the Lord of the Rings movies.
But there are things particular to the movie that I genuinely liked, and I don’t think that my previous connection with the source material invalidates my opinion.