Dayani and cousins saw the new Narnia movie a second time yesterday. Theatre, popcorn, gelato–the whole thing and I must admit that I didn’t mind seeing it a second time either. As spectacle the movie is fascinating. Beautiful moments in the movie: 1. the portal into Narnia from the train station–just beautiful ! 2. the stream of rose petals that leads Lucy to Aslan–pure fantasy wonderfully shot, 3. the scene with Poseidon spitting out the bad guys in a squall–very very nice. For spectacle the movie gets an 8/10.

It is also a pro-war movie. For a fraction of a second, perhaps less, if that is possible, we see a war pamphlet stuck on a pillar at the beginning of the movie. And then the plot turns into correcting a war of succession that has gone awry. The song over the final credits speaks of going off to war and not being forgotten. Fight the good fight, the movie seems to say.

And yet, there is something problematic about this war and the way the story unfolds. The human Telmarines treat the Narnians as an inferior species. This is why they invaded them and took over their land and wrote them off as extinct. The Narnians are a composite species: trees, rivers, animals, birds, humans, mythological creatures (and these are obviously belief systems) along with human and sort-of-human beings. The Narnians embody and represent an ecological way of life where species live together. We might want to think of them as an animistic entity. It is hard to overlook this metaphysical dimension of Narnia in C. S. Lewis’s novels anyway. And Aslan the lion is a bridge sort of between this animistic world and Lewis’s conception of a predominantly anthropocentric Christianity. Narnia is not simply magic or spectacle–it is how Christianity could be.

But in this movie version, this metaphysical dimension is missing. Narnia is wonderful as spectacle, as magic. But it stops just short of being an allegory–the fantasy never grounds itself–the way Peter Jackson brought out the allegory in *The Lord of the Rings.* That is a very interesting choice made by Andrew Adamson, the director of Narnia. One wonders why. Why leave a fantasy as a fantasy? The next logical step is to extract the allegory within the fantasy. Narnia stops short of that.

Oh well. The kids sat transfixed the whole time, the popcorn on autopilot. And as spectacle, Prince Caspian is just a visual treat. Are there indeed places on earth like these? Magnificent is the only word.