I first read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when I was seven years of age. I soon read the six following chronicles, and have read them several times since. I've read the first one many. many times and seen two television productions of it just as many times (the BBC and a relatively unknown animated version)...as a result, I have much of the book fairly memorized. What I loved, and still love, about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the wonderful sense of adventure and magic that appens when you stumble through the wardrobe. When I first saw the preview, I was stoked. Finally. I could see my Narnia, and I mean see it, in full CG glory.

But when I got to the theatre, Narnia was not there. There were the names and ideas floating around, but no sense of the world, no sense of adventure, no magic. The book is so slim and straight-forward...why is it that the story is cropped rather than expanded upon? Why are so many of the scenes that are so thrilling in a few choice sentences from Lewis completely flopped in the movie?

They stripped it of its meaning. The children's sense of adventure is absent in all save Lucy; they have rewritten the characters so that they do not WANT to be in this story, and so the plot is forced, every step of the way. The Narnian spirit is lost. The original dialogue is all but gone, the film using abhorringly cheesy American one-liners instead. Particularly botched are what should have been the most moving scenes. The scene coming out of the wardrobe was all right, but the scene in which we ee the witches castle for the first time...instead of a glorious pan up the intimidating fortress, we get a brief glimpse of the exterior, before going into an even less exciting 5-second tour of its interior. Aslan's entrance is the least inspiring scene yet, which is all because they completely removed all the scenes and lines leading up to his entrance. When he steps out of the tent, he does not seem particularly important, a feeling that persists through the rest of the film. And the white witch's entrance was well less than memorable. Most astonishing is the film-maker's decision to completely remove the explanation of the "Deep Magic from before the dawn of time." This will make it impossible for those who haven't read the book to know who Aslan is, who the witch is, and what Narnia is. The stone table is not even introduced. That one explanation, a few simple lines, would have given the film at least a hint of meaning, but instead...why are we fighting this battle at the end, anyway?

Liam Neeson's performance as Aslan was as decent as he could have done. The voice was right, but the lines are all wrong. Not one of Aslan's actual lines seemed to survive the cut to the film. If they had to change one word, they did. Tilda Swinton played a very cold ice queen, and might have made a memorable performance of it if the script had let her. James McAvoy played a very young Tumnus, but that short-coming may easily be forgiven. Georgie Henley was the absolute hilight of the film, playing an absolutely adorable Lucy. Most of the animal voices were mis-matched for their parts.

The computer graphics were the only thing that did not disappoint, particularly the gorgeous sweeps with the griffons and the charge of the centaurs. The film is almost worth seening merely for those, but you'll have to sit through an hour and a half of Narnian mockery to get there.