Book VS Movie: Narnia

Anybody who has seen a movie made out of a book knows that it is impossible for even the best movie makers out there to 100% translate a book to the big screen.  Knowing this, when I go to a book based movie (especially if I have already read the book)  I try and watch it as a movie separate from the book.  This has worked well and allowed me to enjoy many movies that, lets face it will never live up to our lofty 100% idealistic standard.  Today's book to movie conversions that I will be pontificating (I love that word) on will be the first three books in the Chronicles of Narnia.  Now word of warning C.S. Lewis and his Chronicles of Narnia are (besides my Bible) probably my most sacred and cherished reading memories. 

So when they announced they were going to make a movie out of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (hereafter known as LWW) I was torn between excitement and terror.  My poor Hubbin probably thought I was nuts :-)  On the plus side The Lord of the Rings movies had already come out and proven you could make a great movie out of beloved books.  Also PBS/BBC had done a wonderful miniseries back in the day that stayed wonderfully true to the books, but that took close to three hours to pull off.  On the down side, the books themselves are pretty short I can get through LWW in a couple of hours.  It is also a very simple story without a lot of gratuitous(another good word) history, detail or plot lines which seems to be a staple now days.  Also in general the track record for turning books into good movies isn't all that great.  So it was with a mix of excitement and dread that I went to see the movie. I was THRILLED, I really loved it!  Sure they added stuff to it, but I usually don't mind as long as they don't take anything out, and stay as faithful to the plot as you can in a movie.  I thought this movie did a great job of that, it was almost like watching an expanded version of the book.  The movie itself was just beautiful and looked a lot like what I envisioned it to in my head as I grew up. The music was almost it's own character, in fact I am listening to the sound track as I write this ( a little inspiration).  I thought the cast was well chosen and for once age appropriate (I hate it when they make the characters older then they should be...more on that in a different post!) and seriously Liam Neeson can talk all day as the voice of Aslan and I won't complain.  Over all very very pleased with the movie. 

After such a great experience I was understandably excited when the second movie Prince Caspian (hereafter known as PC) came out. When I first read the book Prince Caspian I fell in love with the title character...aw my first book crush...I might have to write a post on that hmmm.....whoops a little off track there, anyways loved this book so excited to see the movie and then :-(  They changed the plot! And I don't just mean a little filler to round out the movie, or to fill time, they changed the whole story!!!  The weird thing is they kept in a lot of little details that only a person who has read the book would notice, like a peace offering for slaughtering the plot?!? 

Then came The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (VDT) Now this may be my favorite book of ALL time, it has everything I love, ocean voyages, mysteries, pirates,humor, Dufflepods, pools that turn anything to gold, an epic quest and a darn good love story.  Of all the books in this series that could be made into a movie with little to no tweaking THIS IS IT! So with one great movie and one crappy movie I was really hoping this one would be great.  The movie sucked, I mean that's all I can really say about it.  They completely changed the whole plot and didn't even keep in little things to appease the readers like they did in PC.  It's like nobody had actually read the book, just had a notion of a story somebody once told them about the book. It may have been an ok movie (again beautiful cinematography and gorgeous music) if it wasn't based on the book.  All in all very disappointing, especially considering how well they did with LWW.  Oh well I guess that is the joy of reading, is I can always go back and read it again :-)  Let me know what you thought of the books/movies  Did you love them all, hate them with the burning of a thousand suns, or actually have a life and don't have that much energy to put into movie vs books dissections.