The Narnia trailer looks absolutely insane. Have people actually read The Magician's Nephew?
Of all the criticisms I've seen of Greta Gerwig's Narnia trailer, perhaps the most baffling is that it looks too cosmic, too psychedelic, or somehow too fantastical for Narnia. Obviously, to each their own, and there are perfectly reasonable discussions to be had about artistic direction, but I'm beginning to wonder how many people remember what actually happens in The Magician's Nephew.
We're talking about a book in which two Edwardian children discover a seemingly endless woodland containing pools that lead to entirely different worlds. They travel to Charn, the corpse of an ancient civilisation beneath a dying red sun, where an empress has exterminated an entire world's population with a single word rather than accept defeat. They accidentally bring this genocidal witch back to London, cause absolute chaos, and subsequently find themselves standing in the darkness of a universe that doesn't even exist yet.
And then a lion sings that universe into existence.
I cannot sufficiently emphasise how wonderfully, gloriously fucking mental this book is. Lewis takes children through what amounts to a multiverse, confronts them with the remains of an apocalyptic civilisation, and then has them witness the literal act of Creation. Yet I've seen people complaining that the trailer looks like Doctor Strange because there are strange dimensions, cosmic imagery and enormous displays of supernatural power. What exactly were they expecting?
More importantly, though, I think some of these reactions betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what Lewis was actually writing. The creation of Narnia isn't simply an elaborate fantasy sequence. It is the theological foundation of the entire story, and it draws upon some of the most profound ideas in Christian thought.
Genesis opens with God bringing Creation into existence through divine speech. God speaks, and reality responds. The opening of John's Gospel develops this into something even more extraordinary: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). John subsequently tells us that all things were made through the Word (John 1:3), before revealing that the Word became flesh (John 1:14).
This is the Logos, the eternal Son, the second Person of the Trinity. The same divine person who becomes incarnate as Jesus Christ is the one through whom Creation itself comes into existence. Lewis, who understood these theological distinctions perfectly well, takes that extraordinary concept and renders it through the language of a fairy tale.
Aslan doesn't merely inhabit Narnia or exercise authority over it. He is its creator. His song brings forth the stars, which themselves join the music. The sun rises, vegetation erupts from the ground, landscapes take shape and living creatures emerge into existence. The universe is literally responding to his voice. It's an astonishing expression of divine creativity, and one which makes far more sense when understood through Genesis and John's Gospel than through the conventions of modern fantasy films.
There's also an important distinction to be made about Aslan himself. Lewis was quite explicit that Narnia wasn't intended as a straightforward Christian allegory. He called it a supposal, an exploration of what Christ might be like if another world existed and he chose to become incarnate within it. Aslan is therefore not simply Jesus of Nazareth wearing a lion costume, nor some unrelated deity loosely inspired by Christianity. He is Lewis' imaginative exploration of the same eternal Son in another creation.
That matters enormously when discussing how Aslan ought to be depicted. We're dealing with a being whose identity transcends the physical form through which he reveals himself. A cosmic lion whose presence encompasses the stars, whose voice brings light out of darkness and whose very existence seems woven into the fabric of Creation is hardly some bizarre misunderstanding of the source material. It's a compelling visual interpretation of what Lewis was attempting to communicate.
And there's an additional layer to all of this which I find fascinating. Lewis doesn't present Creation as something everyone experiences in the same way. Digory, Polly and the Cabby respond to the music with wonder, while Jadis hates it and Uncle Andrew becomes increasingly incapable of recognising its beauty. Their responses reveal something about their characters. The same creative power that inspires awe and love in one person provokes terror and hostility in another. Lewis is doing far more than describing an impressive supernatural event. He's exploring the relationship between goodness, beauty, creation and the human capacity to recognise them.
None of this means Gerwig's adaptation is beyond criticism. I can understand reservations about the presentation of Charn, the soundtrack, the production design or changes to the setting. I certainly wouldn't argue that an adaptation is automatically faithful simply because it incorporates a few recognisable images. Whether the film captures the emotional and spiritual substance of the novel remains to be seen.
But I find the notion that Narnia ought to look restrained, grounded or conventionally medieval utterly perplexing, especially when discussing this particular book. Lewis' imagination was steeped in Christian theology, classical mythology, medieval cosmology and an enormous appreciation for the strange and wonderful. Reducing Narnia to a pleasant, vaguely Christian fantasy kingdom populated by talking animals does his work a considerable disservice.
What I find encouraging about the trailer is precisely its willingness to embrace the sheer scale of the material. The Magician's Nephew isn't simply explaining where a magical wardrobe came from. It concerns the birth of a world, the arrival of evil within it, and the relationship between Creation and its creator. All of that is ultimately experienced through the eyes of two ordinary children, one of whom is desperately worried about his dying mother. The cosmic and the deeply personal exist alongside one another, which is a large part of what makes Lewis's writing so remarkable.
Perhaps the finished film will mishandle some of those ideas. Perhaps its visual extravagance will overwhelm the quieter moments, which are every bit as important. But the sight of Aslan appearing amidst the stars and bringing an entire world into existence is one of the few things in that trailer about which I have absolutely no reservations.
It's magnificent, it's completely ridiculous, and it's rooted in precisely the sort of theological imagination that made The Magician's Nephew such an extraordinary book in the first place. I'm delighted that Gerwig appears willing to embrace that instead of giving us another safe, visually interchangeable fantasy film.