tonight christ will be played by a big shaggy cat

Saw Narnia last night. Liked it. Didn’t love it, but liked it. Thought the acting is weak in places, but the strength of delivery elsewhere makes me inclined to think this is a weakness in directing, rather than in acting ability. Thought the CG drops the ball in places, but overall and especially in the battle they are everything we critics need to shut us up these days. Aslan is very well executed animation. Visually and aurally this movie is a faithful transposition of the book with just the right level of grandeur and scale.

No, what risked spoiling this flick for me was the rumbling out there about its obvious allegorical metaphor. Like this should come as a surprise to anyone over fifty years after the book was written and famous.

I mean, so what? And this coming from me, who is usually the first one to throw up his hands in exhasperation when the religious right rears its ugly preachy head. But really: so what?

In June of 2001 the estate planned to remarket Narnia to a new generation with new stories removing all the Christian iconography. Presumably to reach a broader market. Sell more books. Offend fewer consumers. Three months later the Western World would get rocked into a downward spiral of shell-shocked paranoia and arch-conservatism, with the small but vocal religious right settling firmly into the presidential seat. And now major distributors like Disney are much more willing to consider overt religious themes and Walden Media is finding fertile ground.

But again: so what?

Executive Producer Perry Moore himself points out the equally obvious references in Star Wars and The Matrix. Metaphor, both religious and political, absolutely saturates the movie industry. In fact, read this article about how the neo-cons interpret Star Wars and where it went wrong politically. Note the website.

People love a good story. I don’t think anyone could argue that the Bible isn’t full of good stories. In The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, CS Lewis retells the story of the Resurrection. It’s a good story. That’s why Christianity co-opted it from Zoroastrianism in the first place.