Preface
A couple of times over the past year I've sat down to do the prep work for this, and I've felt it was ruining something. While A Quiet Word was everything exploding in my head during PrinceCaspian, writing the blow by blow of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe felt like it spoiled something simple and pure.
My current theory is: because I love Peter I don't mind that what I'm watching is unapologetically his story while the book was undoubtedly Lucy and Edmund's. And one of my greatest skills in life is loving what's there and letting go of what isn't, but when you factor in that I love Edmund most and Lucy is the only female in the Narnia universe that C.S. Lewis never makes stupid, immoral or happily powerless – and the process of writing about the movie suddenly gets all of my hackles up.
Perhaps it's because I see this story as one about how you encounter the Other, the Spiritual Realm, and that doesn't really mean going into the wardrobe any more than stumbling into a cathedral is the first step in religion. It's not meeting Aslan, either, that's the advanced course. The Encounter with the Spiritual Realm, the Other, starts with the first person that you meet – Mr. Tumnus, whom Lucy like a good Christian girl converts by her sheer passive sweetness; the Queen of Narnia, in the tiniest of nods toward the fact that the religion you practice has far more to do with how you were raised than which "side" you have discerned and chosen; and then the Beavers, who are the Guide figure in the Pevensie children's collective Quest. The first two are just The Other, and both Mr. Tumnus and the Queen of Narnia lead you to the Underworld part of the Hero's Journey. And, all told, the full Hero's Journey only works if you consider the Pevensies collectively (which is a neat trick - because at the very least in this story they are only one character subdivided so that Lewis can have them talk to each other), but while the book definitely privileged Lucy and Susan following Aslan and Edmund in the Castle of the White Witch – the Descent into the Underworld and the exploration of the darker places of the Spiritual Realm, finding hope there against all odds – the movie prefers the Battle and Peter's coming of age. After all, only the latter has battle scenes.
The book is a negotiation of Bounds of the Spiritual Realm and the Exploration of the Underworld and the movie is a Coming of Age. And that's fine – if that story didn't work quite well we'd lose over half the canon of Western Literature. But, well, I love Edmund most and the exploration of the Dark is much more fascinating than whether or not Peter will man up (although the nod to the fact that any ordinary boy won't automatically be a good hero – much less king – over a magical land just by virtue of stumbling into it is nice, don't get me wrong).
From a production standpoint, it makes worlds of sense. They can bank on a slightly older actor to anchor the film – and these decisions were almost certainly made before they knew how fantastic Georgie Henley and Skandar Keynes would be. So I get it, but because it's more straightforward, there's less to say. And that's where we are and why this is slow in appearing.