Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Last night I watched Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  It is the third movie in the Narnia series.  It is about three kids who leave our world and enter the magical world of Narnia.  They go on a quest with Caspian (from the last movie) to collect all seven swords to defeat an unknown evil.

I was so mad watching this movie.  I love the Narnia books, but I was quite ready to allow them to take a bit of creative licence with the books, especially this one that doesn't have quite a linear plot.  I was okay with the added plot device of having to collect the swords of the seven lords as a plot device to tie it all together.  However, the character development was very lacking.  The characters each have to face their "biggest temptation", which, for the most part, wasn't in character.  But the main problem that made me mad was that the visual effects were just not impressive.  The book was all about showcasing the beautiful, magical world of Narnia, where anything can happen.  The movie just wasn't magical, there wasn't anything that I said "Wow!  That's cool".  There is one scene where Lucy is looking at a book of spells and they could have done all kinds of cool visual effects with it, but it felt run of the mill.  They also didn't have little nods to the book, in that same scene Lucy walks down a hall and in the book there were scary masks on the wall, in the movie the mask were no where to be seen.  It's that lack of attention to detail that really sunk this movie, it could have been a visual effects dream but it missed the boat in favor of a plot that didn't work.

I would recommend this movie to fans of the other Narnia movies, just because it continues the story, but defiantly not to people who have read the book.

IMDB: Lost $50 million dollars, not surprisingly.