The Voyage of the Dawn Treader review

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader review ; The royal film performance is a tradition only slightly older than the Narnia books themselves, beginning as it did with A Matter of Life and Death in 1946. But the nod of favour bestowed by the arrival of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at a grandiose screening in Leicester Square meant that, after an exhausting three-year haul, a sense of occasion was finally imparted to the premiere of a film that nearly didn't happen.

The travails of the third instalment of the Narnia series have been chronicled in the film industry trade papers: how producing studio Disney first delayed, and then pulled out of financing Dawn Treader, after seeing the disappointing returns for Narnia 2, aka Prince Caspian.

Hopes had been high that Narnia could be another Potter, but instead it looked like it had turned into His Dark Materials: the magic of the print works struggled to emerge on to the screen.

So it's heartening to report that Dawn Treader arrives with confidence and bravado intact – the entirely expected stew of cod-medieval adolescent derring-do, attention-grabbing special effects, and sledgehammer moral lessons with nakedly religious overtones. You can't help but be struck once again by the common elements the Narnia books have with Lord of the Rings; produced in the same dark, drab postwar years, attempting to reinforce the moral sense that Lewis and Tolkien presumably saw had been both drained and somehow redeemed by the war and its outcome.

The plot of Dawn Treader is arguably the most Tolkien-esque of the Narnia books, albeit with a Homeric slant: the two younger Pevensie siblings, Lucy and Edmund, re-enter Narnia through the portal of an animated painting, and find themselves helping Caspian on an island-hopping quest to rid the land of a curse emanating from the "Dark Isle". Their annoying younger cousin Eustace is along for the ride too; in one of the series' most winning aspects, the Narnia-believing baton will be passed to him as the others grow to adulthood and leave their childish fantasies behind.

One thing the Narnia stories have never lacked is a fertile, powerful mythic underpinning – Lewis was easily Tolkien's equal in this regard.

If anything, though, it feels almost as if too much has been shoehorned in; so vivid are many of Lewis's tableaux that you are barely given time to linger before being whisked on to the next. One moment we are peeking into the invisible mansion on Coriakin's island, the next we are gawking at the gruesome contents of the lake of gold.

British director Michael Apted — an astonishingly experienced figure whose feature film credits stretch way back to the early 70s — has rendered all this with near faultless scrupulousness; very much in the high-key, heavily structured Potter style. Imposing angles, high-impact compositions, kinetic action shots: nothing, cinematically, is left to chance.

The weaknesses, unfortunately, are human; like the Potter kids, performance anxiety is getting to the Pevensies. As they get older, in the real world, their self-consciousness increases, and acting abilities decline in inverse proportion. (The only benefit of delay in filming has been to manage the substantial time jump between this and the Prince Caspian movie fairly seamlessly.)

Moreover, the godlike burbling of Liam Neeson, the voice of Aslan, kills the film stone dead whenever the lion has to deliver one of his homilies.

Narnia's standard of acting might be saved, however, by the fresh transfusions built into the story. Will Poulter, from Son of Rambow, pretty much steals the show, evincing laudable snottiness as Eustace; presumably he will be retained if and when The Silver Chair gets off the ground. On the strength of Dawn Treader, you have to say it will be sooner rather than later. For the latest updates PRESS CTR + D or visit Stock Market news Today

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