The chronicles narnia 3 movie series#
If nothing else, the film is at least consistent in familiarity, just like its formulaic predecessors, hitting trope, after trope, after trope, until it becomes hardly anything we haven't seen before out of this series or out an interpretation of subject matter of this type, unless, of course, you take into account that this story is a little more light than usual.
I suppose the film doesn't put as much attention as its predecessors into its plot's layers, as it just doesn't have time to meander that much, but this installment is somehow arguably about as aimless as either of its predecessors, for thinness to substance is emphasized by the attempts at bloating that only result in pacing inconsistencies, and the attempts at breaking fluff with tension that only result in tonal inconsistencies. The film is even more uneven with its tone than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", and such inconsistency goes matched by an unevenness in pacing, because even though this film, at just under two hours, is the shortest of the "Chronicles of Narnia" films by a relatively sizable margin, storytelling is still bloated with fluffy filler and excess material to shake coherency in focus. There's something much less consequential about this film, even more so than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", but that's hardly an excuse for this film to be so much fluffier than its predecessors, at least to the point of tonal unevenness, for although this is still not the overtly Disneyfied film that we were fearing an installment in this series would be when Disney was calling the shots, what tension there is often finds itself broken by overly fluffy comic relief, while a more realized sense of fluff is sometimes broken by an almost unsubtly considerable attention to the weight of this adventure opus' conflict, however limited it may be. Jokes aside, this film is decent, but it's a little more watered down than its predecessors, and for a number of reasons. In all sorts of ways, this film is kicking powerful mice out of this franchise, though it's hard to tell the difference, because when it comes to the Reepicheep voice change, all they did was trade out one English comedian for another, and when it comes to the studio change, 20th Century Fox still Disneyfied this subject matter. Seriously though, there is at least something different about this film, and that is its being picked up by 20th Century Fox after it got dropped by Disney, as well as its replacing Eddie Izzard with Simon Pegg as Reepicheep. Speaking of meandering, I think you get the point about my lamely joking about someone who actually voyages during the dawn, but hey, at least give me some credit for trying to come up with a play on the title that isn't "The Voyage of the Yawn Treader" once again, because someone here has to be original, and it's sure not this film.
Quite frankly, I think the excitement level of this film is enough to distinguish it from high fantasy "epics" like "The Lord of the Rings", for even the title's underwhelming, because, really, just how extensive of a voyage can this be if it's being led by someone who only treads around dawn? Dawn usually lasts around half an hour or so, so it figures that this "Chronicles of Narnia" installment actually runs under two hours and still be way too long. like "Shrek Forever After", or because they had to kick Adamson to the curb due to people's drawing enough comparisons between this series and the "Lord of the Rings" series with a Kiwi filmmaker being taken out of account.
The world is indeed not enough for director Michael Apted, James Bond fans, so he's heading off to Narnia, either because Andrew Adamson had more important things to do in 2010.