Chronicles of Narnia Books/Movies Topic

They already are.

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I think a part of the film’s problems was after the White witch there wasn’t a strong antagonist, and the film’s kept almost bringing her back. Being high fantasy villians are incredibly important. Along with the fact Narnia itself wasn’t consistent between film’s letting extremely long time spans between film’s, forcing the audience to relearn the world each film.

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The Narnia films were a big part of my childhood, but I havent seen them recently.

From what I can remember, Miraz was a perfectly competent villain in Caspian. I especially love the infighting between his generals, showcasing how his court is filled with opportunists who value power above loyalty.

The real villains of Prince Caspian was the Telmarine culture of conquest and dictatorship. Caspian wasn’t merely fighting his uncle, he was fighting his legacy.

In contrast, Voyage of The Dawn Treader is in book form just about the journey to the end of the world. Their different stops are various learning experiences that helpthe characters grow.

The Dawn Treader film reused the White Witch because she was the manifestation of Edmund’s struggle with temptation. It provided a nice throughline for the otherwise pretty thematically disconnected stories.

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Well… I am pretty hyped to see where this goes!

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If you read the articles in the link, it makes me a little worried.

“A universe”, “anything Game of Thrones like” is a little scary to me. And apparently the writer is the same one who did Coco.

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I absolutely adore the first film, love the second film, and enjoy the third for what it is (even if it lacks Harry Gregson-Williams’s magnificent score. I’m hopeful for the Netflix adaptions to be good but if they don’t get Tilda Swindon back I’ll be irate. She’s practically begged there to be an adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew so that she can reprise being Jadis.

@ProfSrlojohn If Netflix were smart they’d bring back Markus and McFeely as advisors. They had a firm handle on balancing the themes of the novels with the needs of live-action. I’m not opposed to the idea of expanding the universe, though - there are enormous gaps of time between most of the books, which means there’s potential to more deftly explain the geopolitical situations and history that the films had to kind of gloss over for the sake of time.

EDITING FOR DOUBLE POSING- Sponge Faces.

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Heathen!

Have you ever seen the BBC versions? I think they are vastly superior. They covered the books much better, and followed the books much more closely, than the modern movies. The first one was okay, the second had parts that didn’t exist, such as storming Miraz’s castle, and the third was more like ‘Based’ instead of adaptation. It completely change the entire story, except for a few critical points.

The thing is, making more movies would have filled that in, particularly The horse and his Boy and The Magician’s Nephew

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Have you ever seen the BBC versions? I think they are vastly superior. They covered the books much better, and followed the books much more closely, than the modern movies. The first one was okay, the second had parts that didn’t exist, such as storming Miraz’s castle, and the third was more like ‘Based’ instead of adaptation. It completely change the entire story, except for a few critical points.

The films are some of the most genuinely magical I’ve seen. It feels like Narnia to me and that’s huge. The score is also amazing. Dawn Treader is indeed weaker than it should b, but it’s also not an easy movie to adapt - it’s episodic with no real central conflict or villain. The movie did an okay job at tying things together but I liked it.

As for the movie order, they were going in book release order. That was always the plan - the writers really respect the source material. The Horse and His Boy is 5th and The Magician’s Nephew is 7th. The plan was always to do the other films later, but the movies stopped making money so the series stopped.

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that’s the thing, the BBC versions actually DID that and did it well, in addition to staying true to the books in all 4 of them.

That I didn’t know, interesting.

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It may not have been part of the book, but it ties directly into the theme of Peter’s arrogance in Prince Caspian (again, not present in the original C. S. Lewis stories, but a very natural evolution of the character given his status as High King).

There’s so much to like about this scene: Edmund’s leap of faith onto the griffon’s back, Miraz’s order to lay down crossbow fire on the battlefield despite all the Telmarines still present, the Narnians trapped behind the portcullis, and then the complete cut to silence as Edmund files over the carnage.

It may not have adapted the original very faithfully (which, given it’s unconventional story-told-to-the-kids-by-Trumpkin narrative, would have been very hard to adapt into a blockbuster), but the film wove a different tale about the cost of war and the consequences of human pride.

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Point conceded. I just kinda wish it had been like the BBC versions, that were able to pull it off without diverging from the books too much.

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We may be getting that with the upcoming Netflix series. In which case, we’ll have had three distinct live-action incarnations: one that takes more liberties to tell it’s own self-contained high fantasy story (the Walden Media trilogy), another that embraces the original fairy tale spirit of the books despite technical limitations (the BBC versions) and a third that may go in a completely different direction (the Netflix adaptations).

In any case, it’s an exciting time to be a Narnia fan. For a long time I’ve had concepts for Narnia LEGO sets and minifigs rattling around in my head, I may get to work on them as the Netflix series premiere draws closer.

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Definitely do so. Also, Narnia isn’t on Idea’s list of options, so i could be interesting to see if we could get something through when the show comes out.

Also, do you remember the Narnia GameBoy Advance game?

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Nope. I do vividly remember renting the PS2 game when I was a kid though.

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Same name, same studio, same game, different gameplay.
The console versions we’re mostly the same, but the DS and GBA versions were very different from the consoles, and slightly different from each other.

my cousins had the GBA version, but I never got to play it. What is interesting is they got the actors from the movies to reprise their roles.

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This is the sticking point. The Narnia books emphatically are not blockbusters. Trying to force the stories to conform to a mold that wasn’t made to fit them can easily break them. The producers did a mostly-admirable job given the constraints they had to work within…but those constraints doomed them to failure (LWW excluded).

I agree about Netflix–if they can keep the spirit of the books like the BBC versions, but with faster pacing and better effects, they could really do something outstanding.

IIIIII doooooo

I remember eating so much toast it was amazing none of my characters had digestion issues. :stuck_out_tongue:

I seem to remember all the dialogue being in text–voice acting is nearly unheard of in GBA games. Or were you talking about the PC/console version?

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Console and DS.

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Interesting. I kinda want to check the DS version out now.

I could be wrong about this though. It is wikipedia, and I just extrapolated from what I know of the GBA version, the capabilities of the DS, and that it never specified which ones had them or not…

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Wasn’t the Last Battle the last one to be written?