The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The third installment in the film adaptation of C. S. Lewis's beloved series of children's parables features a new director. The veteran Michael Apted takes over from Andrew Adamson, who made the splendiferous films of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. The good news is that Dawn Treader is a worthy successor to Adamson's entries.
The opening half hour, though, is a little disappointing. Keeping to the convention established in the first film, the setting is the Second World War. (Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who worked on the screenplays for both the other Narnia pictures, collaborate here with Michael Petroni.) The two oldest Pevensies, Peter and Susan, have moved to Cambridge with their father, while Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) are stuck at their aunt's, where they have to put up with their officious, whining cousin Eustace (Will Poulter).
The three children are called to Narnia when a ship in a painting comes alive. It turns out to be the Dawn Treader, captained by the Pevensies' old comrade Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes), on a quest to find seven lords who never returned after being dispatched by Caspian's late father to the far islands. Apted's too-broad direction of the early episodes gives rein to Poulter's tendency toward mugging, and the scene on the first island they visit, in which pirates attempt to sell Caspian and the others into slavery, is both unimaginative and clumsy.
