Shaun Reviews THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER...The Latest Overbudgeted & Underwritten NARNIA Film

rating: 2.5

Very much a reinforcement of both the good and bad of the Narnia films - though proving ultimately more bad than good - The Voyage of the Dawn Treader provides some light entertainment with its striking visuals and colourful characters, but with a plot as mild as ever, and lacking a potent emotional kick, this is surely the weakest of the three films. Lucy Pevensie (Georgie Henley) and her brother, Edmund (Skander Keynes) are now living with their obnoxious cousin Eustace Scrubb (Will Poulter) while their older siblings, Peter (William Moseley) and Susan (Anna Popplewell), have moved on from the magic of Narnia to lead their adult lives. Fed up with their cousin and itching to get back to Finchley, they are soon enough pulled back into Narnia when a painting containing a Narnian-looking boat in Eustace's home comes to life; the boat is the Dawn Treader, belonging to Caspian X (Ben Barnes), known as Prince Caspian in the previous film. While familiar rodent face Reepicheep (Simon Pegg, taking the place of Eddie Izzard) is along for the ride, the cantankerous, petulant prig Eustace has also been swept up in their quest, as they try to help Caspian find the Seven Lost Swords of Narnia. While the previous Narnia entries were certainly meandering, they at least had a clear, stratified trajectory; the first sought to establish the world of Narnia and Aslan's status as a God-like fixture, while the second was a more conventional - though also more action-packed - swords-and-shields fantasy war pic. The directionless third installment, however, struggles to provide a particularly interesting reason for the children to return to this magical world, and thus its lack of both excitement and thrilling set-pieces notwithstanding, it also categorically fails until the very end to push the emotional arcs that series fans will by now be mightily invested in. Of course, the superb production design and dazzling visual effects - especially of the Dawn Treader and Aslan - are likely to earn at least one Oscar nomination between them, yet Michael Apted's peculiar decision to shoot the film digitally rather than on 35mm gives it a strangely uncanny look, as though aping the look of either a documentary or a gritty Michael Mann film. For a light bit of escapist fantasy, it is truly peculiar technical decision, yet thankfully most won't care to notice it. Character-wise, little has changed from Prince Caspian, perhaps other than the equally strange choice to curtail Barnes' Inigo Montoya-inspired accent, a facet far more distracting than the digital sheen. Meanwhile, Eustace - though unquestionably brought to life adequately by Will Poulter - is the series' most irritating supporting character, and while that may absolutely be the point, it makes for a viewing experience often more head-smackingly annoying than funny. Worse than all this, however, is that despite the film's apparent pretension to editorialisation - it runs a whole half hour shorter than either of the previous films - Dawn Treader is the most cumbersome of the lot, loitering around without any sense of a structure for far too long, and only really coming together in the final five minutes. Prancing from an uninspired slave trade episode to the mind-numbing proceduralism of having to collect seven magical swords - at this point somewhat reminiscent of the laboured Horcruxes employed in the Harry Potter films, though lacking that same finality - the film, and indeed the story, to often seems to take the "it happens because it's magic" route. Still, fans are unlikely to be deterred; the visuals are hugely impressive for the most part, and Liam Neeson's Aslan is as welcome as ever, with the end giving fans enough closure while also leaving certain doors gaping open should the film do good business. For the rest of us, it's meek fantasy fare that's overbudgeted, underwritten, and while it may have happened this way in the novel, that doesn't mean it is any good, nor that we should give it a free pass... The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is in cinema's now.