The Chronicles of Narnia

Having been a geek (not in its current trendy meaning, but in the original meaning) in my youth, I did a lot of reading, particularly of fantasy. The Chronicles of Narnia were among my favorites. I am extremely excited to see the movie that is coming out shortly.

I should state at the outset that, although I was raised Christian, I don't think it "took".

I am interested (or perhaps even apprehensive) to see what is done with the underlying Christian theme to the book. It is undeniably a metaphor for Jesus' death and ressurrection, and the redemption that Christians believe came with it. However, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is emphatically not a didactic book which attmpt to sway the reader to Christianity. It is more of a re-telling of what Lewis, like other Christians, already considered "the greatest story ever told".

There are two ways in which this movie could fail, and fail miserably. (Note that by "fail", I do not mean fail at the box office. I mean fail to retell a truly wonderful book in an appropriate way.) The first, and more unlikely, IMO, is for the movie to attempt to take advantage of the increasingly vocal Christian majority in this country (witness, for example, the success of Mel Gibson's "Passion" movie). If the movie was made didactic, or pushes its message on the reader, then it will be off-putting, in my opinion, and will both fail to re-tell the story and, ironically, will fail to express the message that Lewis sought to deliver: the beauty of Christianity. This is a very specific message. Lewis believed (IMO) that by expressing the beauty, the reader would grow to embrace the message as truth but he did not attempt to express it as truth in his stories...with the possible exception of That Hideous Strength.

The other way it could fail would be to suppress the message entirely. The book is a Christian story. To deny this would be to deny the very core of the story. If a faithful retelling of the story requires that the production company take a risk of offending its atheist viewers, then that is simply evidence of what a truly gifted storyteller Lewis was.