The new trailer for Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader makes the very weird decision to start at the end. The first few seconds of this trailer are taken from the very last few minutes of the film. They’re attempting to convince you that this is the way the kids got to Narnia, by having Aslan make some sort of hole in the water. I’m not sure why this is preferable, from a marketing standpoint, to the way they actually get there in the film: via a magic picture which fills their bedroom with water, but well, here’s the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Strange decision.
At least this trailer features more of Eustace, whom I’ve been a long supporter of and who has pretty much gotten left out of a lot of the movie’s other marketing materials. He’s the new human character added for this adventure and, in the books, he’s also C.S. Lewis’s best written, most realistic character. Well until he gets turned into a dragon that is. But even that, at least in the context of the books, really works.
Will it work on film? I’m not so sure. You’ll see a lot of Eustace though, both in his whiny little boy form and in his dragon form, in the trailer embedded below.
In a lot of ways, Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the most unique of C.S. Lewis’s books. It’s the most un-Narnian story he tells, in part because it doesn’t actually take place in Narnia and in larger part because many of the early books main characters are abandoned. But it’s also the most overtly religious of the bunch, as you may have noticed from the trailer, with all the talk of faith. It’s a story which quite literally ends when the characters reach the gates of Aslan, the Jesus stand-in’s heaven and, one of them ascends to it. But there’s a lot of adventure to be had before that and while the ending is out of place and preachy, if done right it should be easy to get past that and enjoy the rest of the fun.
For more on Voyage of the Dawn Treader visit Narnia in our Blend Film Database.
