In an effort to kill two birds with one stone (and in order to clear out the back catalog of draft posts I’ve got left over from 2005) I’m going to post my thoughts on Narnia and Harry Potter in the same post. Hopefully this will act as a useful comparison of the two films.
Personally, I consider them each to be different cinematic experiences, but critics (and the vast majority of the viewing public) seem to bundle them together as the two “Christmas heavy weights for kids” (Kong isn’t a kids movie – yes, adults will take them to see it, but they’ll laugh at the wrong bits and won’t appreciate the “inhumanity” of a large chunk of cgi being blown to bits atop the Empire State building, or something).
I’m sure everyone is familiar with The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and that most people are aware of Harry Potter, even if they don’t know the ins and outs of his adventures. Both are well loved children’s “classics” (I use the term very vaguely with regards to Potter, but assuredly with regards to TLTWTW), and both feature child protagonists and magical adventures. Narnia, however, is far more epic than Potter’s latest, and in its theatrical form feels almost like a child’s version of The Lord of the Rings.
For viewers of both, this might not work in its favour – the inevitable comparisons between Rings’ final battle scenes and Narnia’s will bemoan that apparent attempt at trying to “out-Rings” Peter Jackson’s film. I had no problem with the final battle scenes in Narnia; the protagonists here are children, and I found the final battle scenes engaging and visually effective (the White Witch’s polar bear led sleigh is a fantastic image).
Potter’s latest (The Goblet of Fire) is, in my opinion, a slightly more entertaining film than Narnia. It’s paced brilliantly, using each of the trials to break up the films other sections (which is the past have been given far too much screen time, and leave a somewhat rancid taste in the mouth). This might be a good point to mention that I’ve not been a fan of Potter movies so far – I found them to be unimaginative, over-long, and really quite dull. This latest Potter movie does everything right: It has a great villain, a good pay-off, it’s excellently paced, reasonably well acted, and has some nice effects. It does rely on knowledge of the previous films, and does feature a little too much “trendy” dialogue for my liking (Ron tells Harry to “piss off” at one point, for example). All that said, Potter gets a thumbs up from me for now.
Narnia, on the other hand, takes a little more time to get going, never quite feels like it’s paced entertainingly enough to engage viewers for its duration, but offers some great final scenes, and is probably a better film for younger children (Potter gets quite dark, and quite scary towards the end). The White Which is brilliantly portrayed, as are most of the talking animals, in all honesty. I thought talking beavers would cause me indescribable amounts of physical pain, but at no time did I find myself wanting to stab knitting needles into my ears (a good thing, in my book). The film has some moving moments, although the excellent cgi Azlan never quite feels real enough to produce genuine emotion in his later scenes, and the children, on the whole, do a great job.
I wasn’t terribly keen on the photogenic young thing cast as Peter (his acting talent was obvious a secondary consideration after his looks), but Lucy, Susan, and Edmund are all convincing (Lucy in particular). So, both films are well worth seeing, and neither feels like anywhere near the letdown that is Kong (but I’ve been there once already and won’t be going back until the DVD release).
