Narnia review
Dec. 17th, 2005 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kenjariOther Kenjari and I saw Narnia last night. It was pretty good, but I have to admit that I wan't as blown away as I was expecting to be. Maybe it's that reading Narnia wasn't quite the pivotal experience for me that it was for others. Not like reading Tolkien was.
What I liked:
The scene where Lucy first enters Narnia is amazing - everything looks beautiful and magical. And James McAvoy, the actor who played Tumnus, was perfect.
Georgie Hensley, the actress who played Lucy. I agree that she sometimes looked a little too cheerful during certain scenes, as if she let her enjoyment of making the movie show through too much. However, I am very glad that the director did not go with the type of child actor all too common in Hollywood these days: a chikd who is too pretty, too cute, or too ideal in some way.
Tilda Swinton just about steals the movie as the White Witch. She makes the Witch frightening without being at all maniacal, or even showing a lot of brute force. She's unemotional, yet unpredictable. And her lack of real, sincere enjoyment of her powers, rendered her motivations menacingly shadowy. And the costume design for her was great - she looked alien and strange, yet beautiful and compelling. Oh, and she was pretty good in her fight scene, too.
What I didn't like:
The soundtrack failed to impress me. Harry Gregson-Williams did a better job on Kingdom of Heaven. I felt like the score leaned too much on modern pop idioms at times. This is a story about children living through WWII who enter a fairy-tale style world, so I don't feel like a modern pop sound is really the best choice.
The battle scene was kind of conventional. I think the director could have been more creative. It seemed like he just followed the recipe provided by Peter Jackson and Braveheart.
As an aside, we got a preview for Pirates of the Carribean 2. It looks awesome. I didn;t know Davy Jones was one of the Elder Gods. Even better, he's playe by Bill Nighy.
What I liked:
The scene where Lucy first enters Narnia is amazing - everything looks beautiful and magical. And James McAvoy, the actor who played Tumnus, was perfect.
Georgie Hensley, the actress who played Lucy. I agree that she sometimes looked a little too cheerful during certain scenes, as if she let her enjoyment of making the movie show through too much. However, I am very glad that the director did not go with the type of child actor all too common in Hollywood these days: a chikd who is too pretty, too cute, or too ideal in some way.
Tilda Swinton just about steals the movie as the White Witch. She makes the Witch frightening without being at all maniacal, or even showing a lot of brute force. She's unemotional, yet unpredictable. And her lack of real, sincere enjoyment of her powers, rendered her motivations menacingly shadowy. And the costume design for her was great - she looked alien and strange, yet beautiful and compelling. Oh, and she was pretty good in her fight scene, too.
What I didn't like:
The soundtrack failed to impress me. Harry Gregson-Williams did a better job on Kingdom of Heaven. I felt like the score leaned too much on modern pop idioms at times. This is a story about children living through WWII who enter a fairy-tale style world, so I don't feel like a modern pop sound is really the best choice.
The battle scene was kind of conventional. I think the director could have been more creative. It seemed like he just followed the recipe provided by Peter Jackson and Braveheart.
As an aside, we got a preview for Pirates of the Carribean 2. It looks awesome. I didn;t know Davy Jones was one of the Elder Gods. Even better, he's playe by Bill Nighy.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-17 05:07 pm (UTC)But yes, the Pirates 2 trailer looked great! Even with the Cthulhu-ness of Davy Jones :) (And that was Bill Nighy under that makeup? Cool!)
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Date: 2005-12-17 05:52 pm (UTC)