trying and failing to be Tolkien
I watched The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe tonight. This movie annoyed me on so many levels, and the thing it, it wasn't a bad film, it just was a really bad screenplay, built off of a really contrived series of books.
I'll start off by saying that my biblical background is rather limited, but even I could see through the really thin "Jesus dying for our sins, and then rising from the grave" metaphor. Admittedly, I've not read the book, so perhaps the movie just watered it down sufficiently to appease all the fundamentalists who wanted to have their own Tolkien-like story.
I really, really, don't get the ludicrous attempt to funnel every mythological and fictional creature into the story. Dwarfs, minotaurs, mermaids, unicorns, a burning phoenix? Pick a mythological context, and stick with it. Mix & match mythology is just lame.
What's the deal with the witch? It almost looked like she had some fierce dreadlocks, but then it just looked like a really bad hair day, and that she just needed a good shower.
Additionally, there was a huge amount of backstory missing. Granted this book wasn't written to be the first in the series, so its just the movie that failed miserably at filling in the blanks. The Lord of the Rings movies started off filling in the entire backstory so that it all made sense. Here I had no clue whatsoever what the deal was with the witch & Aslan. Why was there a hundred years of winter? Why did the war just end by having Aslan stare into the witches eyes? Why are the humans supposed to be the saviors of Narnia? The film created way more questions than it answered. Actually, it really didn't answer any questions.