The trailer for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has finally appeared. I’ve been waiting for a long time to see what the adaption of my favorite of the Narnia books would be like. It looks exciting but one big mystery: Where are Eustace and the dragon?
If you read the book (and I’ll try to avoid spoiling it if you haven’t), the character of Eustace and his adventures with a monstrous dragon form one of the story’s major (almost) explicit Christian threads. But Eustace barely appears in the trailer. He has a line or two at the beginning, and — I think — a voice-over line later on, but more important there is no CGI dragon in sight. So are the book’s Christian themes once again being censored or dumbed-down for secular audiences? I think Prince Caspian was hurt by this, especially by its muddling the theme of following Aslan even when you can’t see him.
Of course, the trailer might not mean much; after all the movie is six months or so away, and this is the teaser; the advertising is bound to focus on the familiar characters; and the CGI dragon work might not be completed yet.
Also, there are some teasing dragon-hints right at the trailer’s very close. I was tipped off to this by an observant viewer who commented on the American Papist blog (second comment down as of this posting).
I haven’t forgotten my promise to write about the “revolution in cinema,” by which I mean the Christian revolution: the fact that Hollywood is now realizing the actual numbers of its Christian audience and is now trying to respond. Above all, I mean the recent explosion in Christian-themed fantasy epics on the big screen, including The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia. Very much a reason to celebrate, though most of the films weren’t actually made by Christians. But this may soon change. This is one of the reasons Act One (of which I am a proud graduate) trains Christians for the movies is so that WE can get our own stories up on the big screen.
Not only this, but the cultural war between believers and atheists is going to heat up with this December’s release of The Golden Compass, the first of the three projected films based on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman makes no secret of his hatred for Christian fantasy as written by Lewis and others, and his trilogy is directed toward the need to fight the “oppressivness” of religious belief. Meantime, more Chronicles of Narnia are coming to the screen, not to mention the final two Harry Potter films. The next couple of years are going to be interesting ones at the box office!
But there are some Christians who don’t realize what weapons we need in this war and why. They retreat into their Bibles while continuing to condemn most Christian fantasy literature for paganism, witchcraft, magic, and not having a scriptural quote in every line so people will know that the books are Christian. J. K. Rowling’s insistence that she is a Christian and even that she is writing about her own struggle with faith mean nothing to them. Or else they will make comparisons — Tolkien good, Rowling bad — based on nothing more than the fact that Tolkien has had a Christian label for years, and no one knows that much about Rowling’s beliefs — at least they didn’t when she first started writing.
Here is a wonderful post by an author who points out that one of the most basic problems some Christians have in reading fantasy literature is their lack of knowledge of ancient and medieval Christian symbolism and literature. Rowling, like other Christian fantasy writers, is working from a very rich tradition, which many of the evangelical side — and sadly, many Catholics as well — are ignorant of. They don’t even begin to know how to recognize the allusions in the books. And they simply refuse to open themselves up to knowledge.
This is only a taste of what I want to write. Now that I’ve completed the book, I should have time to explore the subject of the revolution in cinema at greater length — hopefully soon.
Pausing to look at all the sights on our way to Jerusalem. . . Mainly about faith, the Church, film, writing, famous Christian authors, and anything else I'm interested in at the moment.
The photo above was taken at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in March 2007.
Quote of the Month
"The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history."
Pope Benedict XVI to the German Parliament, Sept 22, 2011.
