Chronicles of Narnia

It would be easiest to start with The Magician's Nephew given that you wouldn't need to hire any of the same child actors again for any other movies you want to do. In an ideal world you'd then do The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and Voyage of the Dawn Treader in quick succession, if not immediately back to back like how the Lord of the Rings movies were done. Then The Silver Chair soon after to keep Eustace looking similar to how he looked in Dawn Treader. The Last Battle can get filmed a few years later without too much trouble as long as the cast can still pass as somewhat-teens.

That would require a lot of coordination though, more than it sounds like is taking place here.

I read Magician's Nephew first, and that never bothered me as a kid.

They could probably get away with the Pevensies being adults, given how they were kings and queens for decades before they returned anyway.

Edited by Redmess on Jul 5th 2023 at 11:37:21 AM

But they reverted to children when they went back to Earth.

If they are adults, the story will change to a very somber tone, dealing with four people returning to a world where nobody recognizes them, including their parents, who will be dealing with the disappearance of their children.

The Pevensies will have to live without money, family or legal papers in a war turned country.

And it will make the start of the Dawn Trader impossible.

............

About starting with The Magician's Nephew, I will have to agree with @unknowing.

The book as a prequel works better if you know the future events. So you can go, "Oh, so that's where that lamp post came from." Or "this is why Narnians know about humans."

I say that as someone who started the series with The Magician's Nephew myself.

If you're going to try adapting all the books, then, yeah, Magician's Nephew works better as a prequel rather than a starting point. However, if you just wanted to make a standalone movie or miniseries, then I think doing Magician's Nephew as just its own thing would work quite well.

I mean, The Last Battle is a bit of a downer already anyway.

Fair enough

Lewis probably considered it a happy ending.

Anyway, I doubt any adaptation of The Last Battle will go down the road of killing the heroes.

On the other hand, increasing their by a couple of decades will have horrifying implications and will require a radical change in the story, so you may as well do an original movie instead of pretending that it is an adaptation.

Edited by jawal on Jul 8th 2023 at 2:03:33 PM

I mean, the implications of them already having lived a long adult life and then being forced into being kids again are, themselves, already pretty horrible.

And how would you adapt The Last Battle, then? The whole point of it is that Narnia comes to an end. I guess they could all go back to Earth, but that's still a massive downer ending.

I expect witch , wardrobe and the lion first. If for being the most iconic book in the series.

Really? I did not find it terrible myself.

And it surely is better than finding themselves on the streets of London with no money, no family, and no papers, and with the knowledge that they can never see their parents ever again.

If the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe end with a similar scene, it is a Downer Ending.

If that book ever gets adapted, I expect a radical change in the story, when Narnia is saved and the heroes survive.

Also, they will probably add a lot of action and fights; they may even make Tash the Big Bad of the movie and make him go on to fight Edmund/Eustace one-on-one or something.

Which, of course, will be against the Aesop of the book and will make it into a cheap Hollywood action movie.

Anyway, why do you want the children to age? Just shoot the movies in the span of 5 years or something.

The Prince Caspian movie implied Peter was having a really hard time adjusting to being a child again rather than a warrior-king. C.S Lewis was certainly capable of writing tragic, tormented characters, but that wasn't his focus given the whole children's books thing.

Granted the movies did age up the plot in a sort of G-rated lord of the rings, which is why we always see the battle againt the white witch.

Is probably why latter book have issue because they more for children in way the first too books cant be.

I dunno, The Silver Chair is a pretty bleak book. And The Last Battle is just barely bittersweet.

Edited by PhiSat on Jul 8th 2023 at 1:50:09 PM

I've seen a couple of interpretations for why the Pevensies turn back into children when they leave Narnia after reigning as adults.

One theory is that it reflects what the readers go through in reading the book. The reader, presumably a child, goes on an adventure, experiences becoming a king or queen, then the book ends and they go back into the real world as a kid again, but carrying the experience of what happened all in their head.

Another theory is that it reflects the experiences of war veterans. Many enlisted or were drafted into the World Wars as little more than teens, experienced shocking and terrible events far beyond what one their age would normally go through, and then suddenly were thrust back into civilian life and expected to go "back to normal". But you can't, not when one carries all these memories that you're now expected to just move on from.

Well, relatively normal. World War I marks the transition from a society that considered that sort of wartime experience normal, even aspirational, for late teens and young adults, to a society that empathically did not find that normal at all. Dulce et decorum est was still taken seriously by many people at the time.

I'm very late, but changing the end of the Last Battle so Narnia is saved would...basically require it to be an entirely different story. Narnia's not being threatened by an outside force or by a big villain, it's just run out of time and Tash wandering around has nothing to do with it.

They probably would change the deal with Susan though, given that a whole lot of readers seriously misunderstood the deal with her in that book. Like, a lot of kids totally miss that Susan wasn't actually on the train. It could be changed pretty easily to her wanting her relatives to stop trying to talk about Narnia stuff to her in public and she didn't show up to the Friends of Narnia thing because she has a separate life and just wasn't available.

That being said, it is kind of disturbing how short the Narnian timeline is. It only exists for like...70 years by Earth standards and it's only a few thousand years old when the end comes by Narnian time. Lewis never addresses the age of the Earth in the series and Charn is apparently millions of years old, but it's implied that it sorta evaporated once Jadis left, possibly because a world with no inhabitants has no reason to exist? Or it just got disconnected from the Wood Between the Worlds because no inhabitants or life at all would probably be pretty abhorrent to a place like that.

Charn is a really odd world. It basically comes off as if Aslan kept it around just so that Jadis could escape from it. I mean, if he could destroy a world any time he feels like it...

Or perhaps he doesn't generally destroy worlds, but he made Narnia specifically for the benefit of the Pevensies and their family/friends.

Also, I wonder if any film adaptation could resist turning Tash into some satanic being or roaring monster, maybe even get him involved in a fight.

I think the idea is that every world is supposed to have a pre-defined end. Jadis ruined Charn before that could happen. If Charn's deal was anything like Narnia's, there was actually living entities who were supposed to do the actions of ending the world, the Deplorable World would have killed them all and just...caused Charn to linger on and slowly crumble away instead of ending when it was supposed to.

Edited by Zendervai on Sep 1st 2023 at 1:02:14 PM

Ironically, that makes Charn the more scientifically accurate end of a world.

There also seems to be an implication that Jadis' imprisonment is basically the last thing keeping the world from being destroyed.

What I find interesting is that Jadis was aware that there were other worlds out there, though she apparently couldn't access them herself. She knows Charn's sun being huge and red means its in the last stage of life, even though it has been that way for "hundreds of thousands of years" as far as she was aware. And that the yellow and more bright sun the kids described meant that theirs was a young world, comparatively speaking.

Imagine the library you'd need to preserve that level of knowledge over hundreds of millennia...

Perhaps the Charns simply believed in the many worlds hypothesis, but did not know of a way to travel there.

It is also rather ironic that some podunk wannabe book wizard ended up being the one to discover that power... No wonder Jadis hates his guts.

Given that what little we get of Charn points to it being a normal planet with different laws of magic, and that transferring to the Wood Between the Worlds by ring involves some sort of physical transfer (going past Saturn apparently), I think we're supposed to assume that Charn is in another universe or something. Jadis doesn't have magic on Earth, she only has access to it in places where it already exists, and the magic of Narnia poisons her until she eats the apple. And the Wood Between the Worlds nearly kills her within minutes. But Narnia is like...a closed world? Its entire universe seems to be absolutely tiny and Narnia itself is almost certainly flat. So I'd say Narnia, Earth and Charn are in separate universes.

C.S. Lewis was pretty up on a lot of contemporary science fiction (he definitely read H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon) so the Wood Between the Worlds being a sci-fi idea with a fantasy layer painted over it would make sense. And the rings being used to travel between worlds requiring some sort of primordial...dust? that barely exists anymore would hint that the Wood can't be accessed without that dust and if the people of Charn either never had any or never made the connection, they wouldn't be able to figure it out.

I will say though, it is a little funny that Andrew's heartless experiments basically resulted in a few guinea pigs getting to live out long and happy lives in a truly safe environment. Granted, that might mean a lot of guinea pigs in a few years.

Edited by Zendervai on Sep 1st 2023 at 4:27:36 AM

Yeah, I can definitely see the link with The Time Machine. It is not a big jump from that story to an ancient, dead city at the end of time.

I think the implication is that the primordial dust the rings are made from were not from our dimension, but brought here at some earlier point in the past.

Also, Jadis killed everyone and everything on the planet, so her plan to be freed from her own freezing spell always counted on someone from another world coming to do it.

Narnia is what happens when Aslan decides to go all Art Deco on his world building. And then speed runs the whole project.

Guinea Pig Wood!
Transporting guinea pigs
From point A to point B
Utilizing the latest
Magic guinea pig technology
Conveniently and safely!

Both tolkien and lewis read sci fi but the latter did dabble more on it. So I think charm was indeed close to be destroyed since it just didnt have anything sustain it. Probably indeed was the only living thing of it.

Also is hilarious the kinda retcon lewis engage compared of what the beaver said of her in first book.

Not probably, Jadis was 100% the only person living on Charn. The Deplorable Word kills everything but the speaker and there's no reason to assume otherwise.

The interesting bit is that C.S. Lewis wrote the Space Trilogy specifically because he fucking hated Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. Like, loathed it on a truly visceral level. It sounds like the initial inspiration was Lewis not liking the way the Grand High Lunar was written in First Men in the Moon, but there's a bit in Out of the Silent Planet that's a direct attack on the core thesis of Last and First Men.

Last and First Men is a...novel? (it's written like a really dry history textbook and like 90% of it doesn't even have any distinct characters) about like, humans evolving into different future species and later engineering species and as the Earth dies, a future race of humanity moves to Venus and wipes out the inhabitants and then they move to Neptune (?) and do the same thing there.

There's a bit in Out of the Silent Planet where the villain tries to explain to the natives of Malacandra (Mars) why humans should be allowed to move to Mars and wipe out the inhabitants and also why humans changing to fit every world they move to is a good thing. But he's getting his big and eloquent speech translated via the main character (Ransom) who doesn't speak Malacandran very well. So it gets really dumbed down into "it's good for you to die for us to live" and "it doesn't matter if future humans aren't human because they are human". Interestingly, the ruler of Mars doesn't seem to have an issue with adaptation, but he thinks the whole idea of humans doing a colonialism forever and wiping out any competitors is idiotic and insane because doing so means that, not only are you killing off people who didn't do anything wrong, you're not even extending the life of your own species or culture, you're just...replacing them with someone else you don't know and only care about because there's a genetic connection to you.

The rest of the Space Trilogy gets really weird and allegorical (JRR Tolkien fucking hated the third one) but Out of the Silent Planet is a legitimately great piece of science fiction, and an early example of social science fiction, where it's less interested in the cool science or the badass hero and more interested in the interaction of cultures and language and learning about the alien planet.

Edited by Zendervai on Sep 2nd 2023 at 3:10:39 PM