Chronicles of Narnia: Religious motives?
Nov 23rd, 2005 by Jordan
God or fantasy?, via Fark
The one movie event I’m most looking forward to besides Brokeback Mountain is The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I guess I didn’t have any great buzz articles to go off until now, even though it’s like a total blogging sin to always use these kinds of links to write posts about. But anyway, this is a vaguely interesting article with very poor spacing and line breaks that talks about the conflict between Christian influences in Chronicles and the mainstream audience. Just because the overwhelming majority of the U.S. is Christian doesn’t mean that the overwhelming majority wants to see a two-and-a-half hour sermon, right?
The fark title says:
Atheists will not watch Chronicles of Narnia because it is a “Christian movie,” which is totally different from Christian fundies boycotting the Harry Potter movies for promoting witchcraft.”
Heh. Gotta love Farkers.
Anyway, it’s a good point. As an athiest myself, I have to say that I am a little turned off by the implication that athiests should avoid the movie because of its religious undertones. If it’s good entertainment, it’s good entertainment, right? But at the same time, am I a hypocrite for saying that I haven’t seen The Passion of the Christ yet? You be the judge.
The fact of the matter is, I have always loved C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles. In fact, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (LWW) is my most-loved book from childhood. I now own the full chronicles, in one volume, and have read the entire series at least three times, front-to-back. Interestingly, although LWW can ultimately be looked at as a metaphor for the Passion story, I find The Last Battle to be the least veiled of all the Chronicles. One of the final scenes, in which all of the animals of Narnia come running to “the end,” is the Left Behind series without all the absurd, superfluous posturing. (Although, this post about churches promoting Narnia mentions the fact that some Christians frown upon the “universalism” aspect of The Last Battle. Hm…)
I will be there on opening day, for sure. And my hope is that this will be the movie event of December. If it turns out to be as good as the previews look, then there’s most definitely going to be more of the Chronicles made.
On a similar note, here’s a pithy little article about the fact that Christians are, themselves, being a little hypocrtical as they “okay!” a movie that has talking animals, magic, and “demons” (per the article), just because they think they know the intentions of the writer. (While, at the same time, they threaten to destroy the Potter series because they think they know the intentions of the writer.)