The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – review of advance screening

Today my four sons and I had the incredible privilege of attending a private screening of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. C. S. Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham introduced the movie and answered questions from the audience afterward. (More on the Q&A session to come in another blog post.)

Narnia has enchanted me since my fifth-grade teacher read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe aloud to our class after lunch. I’ve read the entire series more times than I can count and have enjoyed both the Focus on the Family Radio Theatre dramatizations and the wonderful unabridged recordings of the books. The stories never lose their magic.

I have also thoroughly enjoyed all three Narnia movies, despite the addition of material not included in the books (such as the Susan/Caspian love interest in the second movie and a good bit of added material in Dawn Treader, which I won’t specify here to avoid spoilers).

I tend to be a purist about movie adaptations of books and think it’s arrogant of moviemakers to think a writer like C. S. Lewis needs their help by adding material that’s not in the book. Furthermore, no movie can include everything that’s in the book, and every addition takes away even more time from the author’s content.

However, I understand that movies are different from books in many ways, and that cinematography may require some changes. It’s not called an adaptation for nothing. So I try to view the movies as separate artistic entities—a philosophy I can take only so far, depending on how much I emotionally (not intellectually) enjoy a movie. This provides me a rationale for being wildly inconsistent.

Before the screening, Douglas Gresham was telling several of us that he is a purist and fought hard to keep the movies faithful to the books. He said that everything in the movies that is not faithful to the books represents a battle he lost. He acknowledged that he had to pick his battles and that some compromises were necessary because there are “serious cinematic problems with doing it the way it ought to be done.” He also explained in the post-movie Q&A that some changes were necessary because of budget. Aslan, Reepicheep, and the dragon were very expensive to create, for example. I was encouraged by his approach and glad to know that he is representing Lewis well.

So what’s my verdict on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader?

I loved it, and I highly recommend it!

Just like the first two Narnia movies, it was visually breathtaking, and the soundtrack was beautiful. The Dawn Treader was gorgeous! Drinian was excellent, and Eustace was perfect. (The novel has one of my favorite opening lines: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”) The picture coming to life in the opening scene was especially well done. I give the movie an A as a separate artistic entity.

From a purist perspective, I was disappointed that they left out the scene where Bern and Drinian knock over Governor Gumpas’s table. My oldest son Forrest said that the short-changing of the slave trade scenes was the most disappointing part for him. I can find no good rationale for changing that section as much as they did. We did, however, appreciate the allusion to It’s a Wonderful Life (one of my all-time favorite movies) in one of the added scenes. Even my ten-year-old caught the allusion.

In the end, what matters is that the movie was faithful to the overall story—much more faithful than the Prince Caspian movie. When asked what he hopes moviegoers will come away with from the film, Gresham replied, “A greater understanding of temptation and how it creeps in from everywhere.” Like the book, the movie also depicted redemption in Aslan’s undragoning of Eustace.

The movie included the most important lines in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which in fact provide a rationale for the entire Chronicles of Narnia. When Lucy and Edmund grieve that they can never return to Narnia, Aslan says they will meet him in their world too:

“But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

Ultimately, the great lion of Narnia points us to the Lion of Judah, who, like Aslan, redeems his treacherous people. And that truly is the greatest story ever told.

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