Bad news today, guys. As regular readers will know, I am a
big fan of CS Lewis' The Chronicles of
Narnia. I've been generally impressed with the cinematic adaptations of the
first three books, The Lion, The Witch
and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian
and Voyage of the Dawntreader. Now
I've found out that a film of the sixth book, The Magician's Nephew, is about to be released. This novel is the
penultimate book, published in 1955, and is listed as first in some editions
because it is a prequel. It takes the reader back in time about fifty years to
the childhood of Professor Digory Kirke, an important supporting character in LW&W. He and his friend Polly
discover the land of Narnia Canada
for all the books. The entire Chronicles have never been under a
single adaptation licence before with just seven years before they all fall out
of copyright. The film has a styled new title: Narnia- The Magician's Nephew.
It will be released onto Netflix in February. The director and writer is Greta Gerwig
whose previous works include Barbie; a
film which, according to her "celebrated the feminism" behind the
doll... You can guess where this is leading! Tilda Swinton has been dropped
despite her captivating embodiment of spite and corruption in her superb portrayal
of the Witch in LW&W. Now Jadis
will be a young and trendy gothic emo played by Emma Mackey. Frank the cabby's
actor is Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, a black man; who else could be the first king
of Narnia? I see Susan Wokoma is in it too. I loved her in Porters, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2018/10/porters-returns-to-dave.html,
but what is her role in Narnia? It doesn't say, but I'm guessing it's Queen
Helen.
But it gets worse... far far worse... wait for it! The voice
of Aslan will be Meryl Streep. I mean, why!? Obviously that's a very rhetorical
question. Sadly the rainbow striped locusts have caught one of the few surviving
franchises that had so far evaded them. Why don't the wokists go away and
invent their own franchises? If they did that I wouldn't complain; but, of
course, if they did that nobody would watch them. That's the issue. They
operate like a virus, infecting popular stories that people already love. It's
also a deliberate act of desecration. Their mission is to demoralize and
humiliate us. They do that by trampling on the works we hold close to our
hearts. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrHU9DGZOGA
(51k views and 73 thumbs up; says it all.) What's ironic is that within the
very pages of The Chronicles of Narnia
itself there are storylines that expose this very type of subversion many
decades before it actually struck. In The
Silver Chair, the two main characters are children at a school called
"Experiment House" which is some kind of cultural Marxist
indoctrination centre for the future youth. In The Last Battle, the final book of the series, the creatures of
Narnia are tricked into worshipping an idol in the form of a donkey dressed in
a Lion's skin to make it look like Aslan the great lion. Even his very identity
is mixed into a fabricated amalgam with the demon Tash, called
"Tashlan". You'll guess that eventually the real Aslan does turn up
and expose the fraud. Obviously I have not yet seen this film, nobody has, but
I've studied the news releases, the trailers and the imagery. I know enough to
predict that this film will be an utter travesty. It will not only be bad, it
will be deliberately bad! That's the
whole point. You can guess I will not be watching it; and neither will millions
of loyal Narnia fans. That's the good news, the silver lining in the cloud.
This waste of celluloid is going to crash and burn just like The Rings of Power. Maybe a time will
come in the future when respectful artistic filmmakers can once again be
permitted to create works of joy, inspiration and wonder that celebrate the
literature from which they come. That time is not now, but I hope one day it
will be.
See here for
background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/08/political-correctness-portal.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment