The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

Tilda Swinton walks into a scene and the temperature drops. That's not a metaphor. As the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, she carries herself with such glacial, imperious calm that you feel the chill through the screen. It's a great villain performance, and for stretches of this film it's almost enough to make you forget that everything surrounding her is merely very good rather than genuinely great.

I want to be fair here, because "merely very good" is not nothing. This is a handsomely mounted, sincerely told adaptation of C.S. Lewis's beloved novel, and arriving as it did in the thick of the 2000s fantasy boom, sandwiched between Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, it had an almost impossible act to follow. Four siblings, evacuated from wartime London, tumble through a wardrobe into the frozen kingdom of Narnia, where the noble lion Aslan is gathering forces to overthrow the Witch's eternal winter. The premise is timeless. The production values are high. The child actors are, honestly, better than they're usually given credit for. And the snowy Narnian landscapes have a real quality to them, enchanted and eerily desolate in equal measure.

The visual effects, Aslan in particular, hold up better than a lot of mid-2000s CGI work. The battle sequences are impressively staged. The themes of sacrifice, faith and redemption are handled with genuine sincerity. And yet. There's a persistent feeling, watching this, that you're in the presence of a film that's hitting its marks without ever truly catching fire.

The tonal wobble is a big part of it. The film swings from talking beavers and Turkish delight to battle deaths and pretty unmistakable crucifixion imagery, and it never quite finds the bridge between those two registers. That's not necessarily a problem with the source material, which earns its darkness over many pages of careful world-building. But on screen, cut together in under two and a half hours, the shifts feel abrupt. You're watching a children's film that occasionally remembers it's about sacrifice and martyrdom, or a religious allegory that occasionally remembers it's supposed to be fun. It struggles to be both at once.

Where Potter worked because it was so rooted in friendship, in the specific textures of adolescent loyalty and loss, and where Tolkien's world felt genuinely inhabited, lived-in, aching with history, Narnia feels a little more like a well-staged allegory. Which, yes, it is. But the best fantasy adaptations make you forget that. This one, for all its polish, keeps reminding you.

None of which makes it a bad film. It doesn't. There's real warmth here, real craft, and Swinton alone is worth the price of admission. If you've got younger viewers in tow, this is a perfectly fine gateway into big-screen fantasy storytelling. I'd never talk anyone out of watching it.

But here's the honest truth: I don't think about it. I don't find myself returning to moments from it, or feeling the pull of its world the way I still feel the pull of Middle-earth or Hogwarts. It's the forgotten sibling of the 2000s fantasy boom, not because it's bad, but because it's just a little too safe, a little too emotionally distant, to leave any lasting mark. A solid three stars. Worth your time, but don't expect it to haunt you.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2005  | Watched: 2026-04-23

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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