On Saturday we (Me and the family) went to see The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This is the third movie in the series. It was also a merry adventure getting to and home from the theater as Snowpocalypse Now! was ragging through Minnesota.
First off, I would like to acknowledge our hosts for the film: KS95, one of the local radio stations, that hosted the special event and the motivating reason behind our challenging blizzard conditions (along with about 60 other people) to see the new Narnia movie. Many thanks to Ryan and his crew for hosting a great event.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the story of Caspian, now King of Narnia, and his quest to find the seven missing lords whose loyalty to his father pushed them into hiding from Caspian’s uncle. Lucy, Edmund and their cousin Eustace find themselves involved in the quest, which challenges them and those around them with the power of temptation, each in their own turn and their own way. They must also defeat a strange evil that is growing in a distant land that forces them to face their greatest fears. Reepicheep becomes a stabilizing factor for the less-than-courageous Eustace and helps Eustace overcome his own personal weaknesses and develop into something more than he was when he entered Narnia.
Georgie Henley as Lucy and Skandar Keynes as Edmund turn in solid performances as they, and the characters they portray, grow to maturity. New to the cast is Will Poulter as the Pevensie’s cousin Eustace Scrubb. It takes a lot of talent to play a deceitful and selfish nit like Eustace and Poulter pulls it off convincingly. You just can’t help but despise Eustace until he is cursed, at which point Eustace becomes a sympathetic character.
The Dawn Treader is a beautiful ship, a mix of styles that includes elements of the Viking longships. Quite beautiful, and, as the Pevensie kids note, quite Narnian. Exceleent scripting and special effects, in addition to solid performances by the entire cast makes for a great film.
Walden Media continues to set the bar high for production values in the Narnia series and delivers an excellent movie that is absolutely best seen on the big screen. From a marketing point of view, they timed the release for a tough time of year as it is up against the latest installment from the Harry Potter films and the upcoming release of the new Tron movie, making ticket sales and the path to profitability challenging. Given the high quality of the movie, they should be able to pull it off as this is, in my opinion, the best of the Narnia films to date.
As an epilogue, yes, we got caught up driving through one of the worst blizzards to hit Minnesota since the ’91 blizzard, and driving home was definitely challenging. Getting the minivan stuck at our offramp was bad enough (we did eventually get free of that thanks to a nice guy in a truck with a snowplow who plowed everyone that was stuck free) only to get bogged down and stuck about a mile from our house as the road we live on hadn’t been plowed that day. We eventually made it home, and got the minivan home on Sunday. It was a merry adventure that we could have lived without, but we’re still glad we did it. We just won’t do something like this again.
