Max DeCurtins looks back at the third, final, and most lackluster installment of the Chronicles of Narnia cinematic universe with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a film that desperately needed at least the comfort of Eddie Izzard voicing Reepicheep.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, loyal 10YA readers: it’s still goddamned 2020. And since all of 2020 has basically been a slow-moving dumpster fire of disaster, I figure it’s the perfect time for a last look at the slow-moving disaster that has been Walden Media’s cinematic realization of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia series of children’s novels.
We like our re-view series here at 10YA. We’ve buzzed and dismembered our way through the Saw movies; we’ve sailed around the Caribbean (and who knows where else) with the Black Pearl; we’ve (largely) watched the boy who lived cast, er, spells with his, er, magic wand; we’ve kept tabs on shirtless vampires. When it comes to the subsequent moviefilms, the common thread is often series fatigue; sometimes we discover things to like in the later iterations, but most of the time, I’d venture that we know just what we’re getting into. (For fuck’s sake, I voluntarily re-viewed two of the three Star Wars prequels.) In that spirit of completion, and at the behest of the esteemed editor, I give you today’s offering: The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader—practically, if not technically, the last film in the Narnia franchise. It’s treading all right—treading water.
In re-viewing three Narnia films for this venerable blog, I’ve come to realize that I resent the Chronicles for what they are, rather than what they aren’t, however much my writing may belie otherwise. They are imaginatively impoverished vehicles for evangelization with just enough of a germ of a premise and veneer of fantasy to be worth treating as a literary artifact adaptable for film. What they aren’t, despite their historical popularity, is a mature creative vision, and the tragedy of the films is that the production team couldn’t see it. They are, at best, a good springboard for a world that was clearly never more than half-baked in Lewis’ mind. In other words, the Chronicles are a goddamned tease. I’ve arrived at the point where I truly believe that a talented fanfic writer could have given the world a better Narnia cinematic experience than what we got from two major studios. But, on to the movie.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (dir. Michael Apted) is possibly the worst Odyssey-type story I have ever seen. I won’t bother recapping the plot, since the Odyssey descriptor tells you all you need to know—the titular Dawn Treader is a ship on a journey, and along the way the crew face trials. There is no singular Odysseus; the role is shared by King Caspian (Ben Barnes), Edmund and Lucy Pevensie (Skandar Keynes and Georgie Henley), and the Pevensies’ prat of a cousin, future Republican, and Ayn Rand fanboy Eustace Scrubb (Will Poulter).
Dawn Treader doesn’t really bother with exposition; we have literally no idea why Edmund and Lucy find themselves unceremoniously dumped in Cambridge while the entire rest of their immediate family are somewhere in the United States. Perhaps the book explains this, but if it does, the writers saw no need to include it. Literally all we know, “explained” in a letter from Susan, is that “the Germans are making the crossing difficult”—but why weren’t Edmund and Lucy with their family in the first place? Is this some proto-Home Alone shit? How did they get left behind?
After an anemic opening in which an underage Edmund, clearly dissatisfied with his Earth life, half-heartedly tries to enlist in the British army—because he’s a king goddamnit, who the fuck wants to enlist in an army when you’ve led one?—we enter Narnia in medias res, the Dawn Treader already en route. Caspian (who has curiously lost the Iberian accent he displayed in the previous film) does some cursory explanation of the mission, but we have no idea why they’ve been summoned back to Narnia in the first place (more on this later). And it goes downhill from there. There are some islands, and some lost lords, and some more islands, and some magic swords, and a vaguely menacing green mist. Despite its overall framing as an Odyssey-type story, Dawn Treader so severely lacks narrative coherence that most of my notes consist of the phrase “OK THEN” with hardly anything else noteworthy interspersed. The tests of character don’t really feel like anything’s at stake. We just move from thing to thing and place to place, discarding most everything except what’s in front of our eyes at any given moment. Roger Ebert’s take on the film essentially boils down to: It’s great fun, if you don’t give two shits about continuity.
Everything that might be mildly constructive about Dawn Treader with respect to the Chronicles film saga comes up a day late and a dollar short. Lucy’s willful naïveté has finally abated, but her character seems barely to have evolved; she’s suddenly preoccupied with her appearance and feels jealous of Susan for being beautiful, but beyond that she doesn’t say much—no opinions, political, emotional, or otherwise. There’s not even a Bechdel test here to fail. At least Lucy fights proper battles now, while the entirety of Susan’s accomplishments since Prince Caspian seem to boil down to being introduced into society and catching the eye of some young naval officer, which we learn in brief cameos by Anna Popplewell. Even in 2010, five years after LWW and still years before the Great Awokening, the writers’ refusal to transcend Lewis’ hideous treatment of his female characters and enrich Susan and Lucy into fully realized leads borders on criminal. Arguably it’s Lucy who should be the most complicated character in this installment; after all, she’s the one who, with her adult siblings, stumbles upon the lamppost at the end of LWW and lets her curiosity get the better of her, which leads to the Pevensies getting shut out of Narnia—quite unintentionally, we can assume. By the time they’re summoned back in Prince Caspian, some 1,300 Narnian years have passed and everything (and everyone) is dead and gone. Isn’t this Lucy’s personal albatross? Wouldn’t they still be in Narnia if it hadn’t been for her? Where’s the search for atonement, the quest to make things right? Don’t we know they chafe against the obscurity of their Earth existence? Shouldn’t there be tension over this?
Edmund has mostly matured into an unusually tempered teenager who nevertheless has Feelings, but Dawn Treader affords him almost no opportunities to express them, continuing what has essentially been the entire saga’s implicit support of the stoic element of toxic masculinity. Where’s the outlet for Edmund’s simmering discontent with his Earth life? Is he still really tormented by the White Witch? Didn’t we dispense with that in the first film? To make matters worse, Edmund and Caspian suddenly discover a brotherly bond that, for fuck’s sake, Edmund and Peter—who are actual brothers—needed to have wrestled with over the previous two films. This genuinely made me mad. Peter, Edmund: it’s time to have a heart-to-heart with a good cry and a big long hug. Boys can have feelings too, even for each other—it’s okay! Alas, barred from a Narnian homecoming like his sister Susan, Peter is mostly a non-entity in Dawn Treader; he is spoken of a handful of times and seen only once, during a vision sequence, in a cameo by perma-twink William Moseley.
Eustace Scrubb, the Pevensies’ cousin, makes for perhaps the most inconsequential character in Dawn Treader, despite being a prattling nuisance who could give Jar Jar Binks a run for his money, when in fact the whole point of the film, if there is one, might be that Eustace Scrubb travels to Narnia to learn How Not to be a Trash Human. He spends a large chunk of the movie as a dragon, transformed after being ensnared by his greed in a lair full of golden treasure on one of the Treader’s several Odyssey-type stops at an island for some new trial or piece to the puzzle. After he is restored to human form (“I’m a boy again!” he tells us, helpfully), and especially in the coda of the film, it’s clear that we’re meant to see Eustace’s journey to Narnia as having provided the heaping dose of humility and compassion he so desperately needed, but this needed to be exposited, not merely assumed ipso facto. When he speaks fondly of Edmund, Lucy, and Narnia in the movie’s brief epilogue, it’s coming on the heels of 97% of his prior dialogue having been disparaging of literally everything, and the whiplash is pretty severe.
The fact is, there’s no raison d’être for any of this. If the point of being summoned to Narnia is that you learn some valuable moral lesson, Dawn Treader falls short in every regard. Lucy doesn’t need Narnia to get over some (frankly normal) adolescent struggles with self-esteem. Edmund doesn’t need to prove that he’s atoned for his original betrayal in LWW; that much is evident in his mature interactions with Lucy—he’s no longer the churlish younger middle child. Even Eustace would eventually get his ass walloped after mouthing off one time too many. Lesson learned! LWW could at least claim to uphold the point of Narnia: four quarrelsome siblings whose Earth life was turned upside-down by war travel to Narnia and discover that they’re better when they look out for each other. That’s a decent premise, truly. Prince Caspian made the classic sequel’s pitch: You go back to Narnia because they’re in shambles and are about to get invaded, HALP PLEASE.
But where’s the premise in Dawn Treader? Shortly after being transported to Narnia and pulled from the sea by the Dawn Treader, Edmund asks Caspian if he called for them, as he did in Prince Caspian by blowing Susan’s horn. “Not this time,” Caspian replies. A moment after that comes the million-dollar question. “So hang on,” begins Edmund: “If there are no wars to fight, and no-one’s in trouble, then why are we here?” Caspian’s answer is basically: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is the existential question of the movie, indeed of the whole film series, distilled into one brief, even unimportant, exchange. Even the Odyssey angle ultimately doesn’t pan out: Caspian’s character test is to prove himself a better king than his father was? As if we hadn’t already learned that in Prince Caspian when he declines to kill Lord Miraz, the precise individual who murdered Caspian’s father? Christian allegory—and Eustace—aside, the Chronicles are at their strongest when they’re about the Pevensies—and they’re not nearly enough about the Pevensies. All four of them needed to forge a family identity, and we needed to see their Narnian identities in real interplay with their Earth identities. We needed a framework for the liminal connections between Narnia and Earth; Professor Kirke, whose wardrobe served as the original portal to Narnia, should have been given a backstory and a role as a narrator of sorts, setting the scenes for each installment. He should have been our guide, as an audience, to this wondrous world that, for the Earth-bound, ever hovers tantalizingly out of view. The threshold to Aslan’s country, at which Edmund, Lucy, Eustace, Caspian, and Reepicheep find themselves in the film’s penultimate minutes, needed to be something other than a blatant copy, with only the most minor of modifications, of Tolkien’s description of “white shores[,] and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise” from Return of the King; a place beyond the sea easily understood as a metaphor for death. And while we’re at it, let’s dial back on the thinly veiled religiosity and the crushing rigidity of gender stereotypes, in which girls don’t issue battle orders and boys don’t have feelings. Surely we can have wholesome themes without either of these things.
These are the kinds of authorial decisions that, as I wrote of Prince Caspian, the writers repeatedly failed to make, but they are the kinds of decisions that would have imbued the Narnia franchise with a sense of intent. They should have gone to the Lewis estate with a pitch: we’d like to do a two-film project that is heavily inspired by, but not a slavish adaptation of, the books. Yes, we are straying from the source material, maybe by a lot; here, look what we do with it. We are not mindless automatons in thrall to capitalism, beep boop.
But of course, beep boop, most large-scale movies have always been a deeply capitalistic enterprise, and Dawn Treader is no different; it’s built to be flashy, stuffed to the gills with CGI effects because neither the story nor the acting is going to bring home the bacon—and what’s more, the studio knows this. The music is surprisingly pleasant, even if it’s constantly a few notes away from sounding like a quote of something else. Composer David Arnold’s fairly straightforward style marks an audible departure from the pop-infused undertones of Harry Gregson-Williams’ scores for the first two films, but Arnold does reuse Gregson-Williams’ main Narnia theme unaltered in its entirety a few times, a rare thing to see when a film franchise brings on a different composer, thanks to the complexities of ownership rights, legalese, and royalties.
In a way, though, the reappearance of the Narnia theme is one of the most remarkable signals of a saga in its death throes. Andrew Adamson handed the directorial reins to Michael Apted. All of the most noteworthy names—Jim Broadbent as Professor Kirke, James McAvoy as Tumnus, Tilda Swinton as the White Witch, and Eddie Izzard as the voice of Reepicheep—are gone from the project. (Swinton has a cameo, but that’s it.) Disney dropped the Chronicles after Prince Caspian’s lackluster box office performance. New editor; new composer. Gregson-Williams may have phoned it in for the score for Caspian while Arnold doesn’t in Dawn Treader, but in this context the Narnia theme sounds like a strangled cri de coeur. “Remember how much you liked The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe! Please like me, too!” When you’re desperate, music is one of those things to which you can turn to pull on the ol’ heartstrings of nostalgia, and it’s a powerful one at that. To my mind, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story takes the crown as the superlative example of this from the last decade, but that’s a re-view for more than a few years from now.
The commonly received wisdom in politics is that the candidate with more money wins. 2020 hasn’t entirely invalidated that idea, but it’s taken a thorough drubbing. Despite a deluge of donations, the campaigns of multiple Democratic Senate and House candidates and incumbents fell short; all the money in the world didn’t net Democrats control of the Senate, and we will be paying for that failure for years to come. It’s hard not to feel impotently enraged, defeated even, by the staggering thought of all that money just…evaporated.
When I take a step back and consider the more than half a billion dollars spent on the production of three Narnia films (and probably several hundred million more on marketing alone), I can’t help but think of the 2020 congressional campaign and its outcome(s). All that money couldn’t overcome the Bayesian fundamentals of political mega-identities and negative partisanship; all that effort couldn’t save the Narnia film franchise from collapsing under the weight of the shoddy internal structure and preening morality of Lewis’ books. And so here we are: technically moribund but dead in practice. It’s clear that the team behind Dawn Treader understood it even at the time as the last hurrah for the Chronicles; Eustace’s short voiceover epilogue after he, Edmund, and Lucy return to Cambridge, paired with the visual of a literal door closing, positively drips with finality.
No amount of money is going to sway someone whose many identities have stacked and multiplied into a partisan mega-identity that fundamentally views Democrats (or Republicans) as dangerous and illegitimate. (See Lilliana Mason and Ezra Klein for more on this subject, for truly it is, I think, a more useful analytical tool for approaching politics than most of the tut-tutting about policy and “messaging”, which is just another word for marketing.) American politics are defined by a system that rewards inertia, which makes overcoming that inertia particularly challenging.
No amount of movies were ever going to make up for the fact that Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy don’t have through-lines across multiple adventures that deepen their characters individually and collectively, that make them complex people whose journeys are worth following. As I said in the beginning (and of LWW), I was never particularly invested in the Chronicles, and if my writing makes me sound like I care, it’s because I’ve now sat through three of the wretched things and, like a student in a group project, I’ve expended enough effort that no matter how much I resent my classmates, I want the project to succeed.
And speaking of resentment: of the three extant Narnia entries, Dawn Treader is the one that most feels like it’s just making shit up as it goes along, and you can’t have endured 2020 under King Fuckface the Inept and not resent the fuck out of that.
(Liam Neeson Aslan Jesus voice): And now, my children who will never return to Narnia, it is time to return to your world, where I will bestow upon you my Mercy, which taketh form as a government led by He who Believeth in It. Go in peace.
— Max DeCurtins
10 Years Ago: Films in Retrospective 