“It is perhaps not possible in a long tale to please everybody at all points, nor to displease everybody at the same points; for I find from the letters that I have received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are all by others specially approved.”
These words—written by J. R. R. Tolkien in the Foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings—remind us that when it comes to individual preferences, there is no pleasing (or displeasing) everyone. What one person really likes, another will insist was a flaw. As evidence of this fact, we might look at the fourth essay in the recent critical anthology Through the Wardrobe, where the author finds fault with the names Lewis gave to Reepicheep and Peepicheek, names which the rest of the world finds irresistible.
Certainly most Lewis fans have a list of things they would have done differently if they had been brought on as a consultant for the first two Narnia films, and I am no exception. And I am firm believer that a film adaptation cannot be (or at least should not be) just anything the filmmakers want it to be. But is it possible to get beyond mere statements of preference—where one person finds a blemish and another expresses approval, statements which have a way of being uttered as if they were absolute truth? (“Opening with the bombing of London was a total mistake.” “The bombing scene was a brilliant way to begin the film.”)
One way to do this might be to distinguish between thematic changes—Do the films say what the books say?—and cinematic changes, changes made in order to adapt a book to a different medium.
The greatest of these cinematic changes in the film adaptation of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has to do with the quest to find the seven lords who were exiled by the evil King Miraz, a mission which Lewis completes in chapter thirteen when the final three lords are found asleep at Aslan’s Table where they had threatened violence to each other there. Lewis has Caspian haltingly suggest, “I think our quest is at an end.” This scene works well on the page but is not exactly the makings of a great cinematic climax. It has certainly never been on anyone’s Top 100 Most Dramatic Moments in Narnia.