The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I’m a bit of a Narnia Fanboy.  I’ll admit it; I love reading the novels and am currently going through the series…again.  As some of you may know, the next installment of Narnia is in production right now.  20^th Century Fox is now filming (or possibly editing) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  You have no idea how excited I am.  First off, this is one of my two favorites from the book (the other being The Last Battle).  So to say I’m excited is a bit of an understatement.

The buzz around the interwebs seems to be a little lackluster.  I’m kind of bummed about this.  I know the Narnia movies weren’t the blockbuster successes that the Lord of the Rings trilogy was.  But in all reality, they are excellent adaptations.  I do think that the LOTR’s success kind of trumped Narnia and set it up for less than stellar ticket sales.  If you look at how the two films were presented, LOTR was shown for the adult world, Narnia was for the family.  You can clearly see this when comparing the battle scenes between LOTR’s The Return of the King, and Narnia’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  LOTR’s was dirty, gritty, in your face.  Narnia’s was like a nice shiny tag match in the playground.  But film critics shouldn’t see this as a negative.  It’s actually more true to the books being that they were shot that way.  LOTR was written more as an adult fantasy land, Narnia was written for younger audiences.  Either way, I still really enjoyed both Narnia movies and the LOTR trilogy.

So, some quick information, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is slated to be released December 10, 2010 (just after my birthday for those wondering).  It has the same actors playing Lucy, Edmund, and Prince Caspian as previously in the series.  I assume they’ll stay on for The Silver Chair to finish out the Caspian triad. 

Now all over the internet there are nay-sayers claiming they probably won’t make all the Narnia movies because they aren’t making them in order.  Also, they claim that the children will be too old to keep playing Lucy, Edmund, Peter, and Susan in future movies, therefore they’ll have to replace them and it’ll suck.  Well, first off, they ARE making them in order.  They are making them in the order that they were written.  It was only in the 80’s that the publisher decided to “re-order” the series to be more chronologically correct.  Second point, since they are making them in literary order, the ages of the actors will not matter because after The Silver Chair, when the children are seen in The Boy and His Horse and The Last Battle they are adults.  So when they finally get to making these movies, the children will probably be the correct age.

So, after this long barrage of nerd-dom what should we do?  GO…SEE…THIS…MOVIE.  Even if you don’t care about this, I want to share Narnia with my kids via books AND movies.  So for the sake of my children, buy tickets to this movie.  You don’t even have to go to the movie, just buy tickets.

So you might be thinking, where is this coming from?  I thought KaGe was a level-headed thinker that has deep thoughts that are sometimes crazy and incorrect.  Well, my nerdiness is just another layer in the onion my friends.  Next time I get in a nerdtastic mood we’ll discuss Star Wars, how the entire series is about Vader, and how it’s a perfect tale of redemption.

My 2¢.
-KaGe