Plead the First

Time has an article on the upcoming Narnia movies, wondering if they’ll maintain their Christian message. There will be an easy way to tell, they say:

The White Witch: “That human creature is mine. His life is forfeit to me. His blood is my property.”

Aslan (later) : “The Witch knew the Deep Magic. But if she could have looked a little further back… she would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.” —from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis

…The second, more intriguing question, “Has it reproduced the Christian character of C.S. Lewis’s book?” could also be worth tens of millions if it inspires Passion of the Christ-style repeat viewings by conservative Christians. And the answer could lie in whether the four sentences above, which constitute a kind of evangelical sniff test make it into the film.

I, for one, think it would be a shame if Disney were to leave out the Christian motifs present in the original story. They’re so intertwined throughout the series, that cutting them out would either involve some major reworking of the story, or would significantly water down the strength of the emotions and motivations of the series’ characters.

There’s little reason to cut them out anyway, as the story is far from preachy. Lewis worked the themes in rather subtley in most cases, and nearly all of the specifics are changed in some way. As the Time article points out, for instance, Aslan’s sacrifice is “on a huge stone table … not [on] a cross; and performed with a stone knife, Aztec-style”, and the books pull from many other traditions such as folk tales, and classical and Norse myths.

One thing I’m not sure about though is Time’s notion that the film could “be worth tens of millions if it inspires Passion of the Christ-style repeat viewings by conservative Christians”. Passion of the Christ was pretty much a literal retelling of a portion of the Bible. It would be hard for most Christians to find fault with that concept. Narnia, on the other hand, is a land populated by magic and witches, and many of the more fundamentalist Christians don’t take too kindly to those things, even when put to use as allegory for Christian themes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2005 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.