Is Narnia Drifting From Its Vision? [Updated]

According to Washington Times newswriter Julia Duin,

In a recent interview posted on NarniaWeb.com, Douglas Gresham, stepson to C. S. Lewis and the man who’s supposed to be holding the line on what his stepfather would have wanted, said he was “ambivalent” on changes made in “Voyage.” But, he was presented with a choice of either accepting those changes or not having a film.

And “Voyage” director Michael Apted, who has admitted to excising a lot of the religious connotations out of his 2007 film “Amazing Grace,” sounds double-minded.

The Narnia films, he told Rhema FM, a New Zealand Christian radio station, “present a challenge, for me to put the material out there in an evenhanded and interesting way; and not to be, in a sense, narrow-minded about it, either narrow-minded in a faith way or narrow-minded in an agnostic way. I have to open my heart to what the stories are about.”

“Narrow-minded in a faith way”? That’s going to rev up Christians to see this movie.

Christian Web sites such as BullyPulpit.com have raised concerns about the filmmakers. For instance, executive producer Perry Moore is a gay activist and the author of “Hero,” a 2007 book about the world’s first gay teen superhero.

Now what if the executive producer of the gay-friendly film “Milk” had been a fundamentalist Christian? You’d hear plenty of questions about that.

Ted Baehr, publisher of Movie Guide and president of the Christian Film and TV Commission, read one of the earlier scripts for “The Lion, the Witch” and told me the movie would have veered in a bizarre direction had then-Disney President Dick Cook not “held the line.”

As for “Voyage,” Mr. Baehr is in touch with a script adviser who left the project a year ago.

“He said it was drifting from its Christian vision,” Mr. Baehr said. “It was not expressing the intent of C.S. Lewis nor the true story of the Dawn Treader.”

The makers of the Narnia movies can’t afford any more “drift” if they wish to keep their religious fan base happy. There’s plenty of evangelical Christian filmmakers and producers out there. Why couldn’t Disney and now Fox hire them?

So, what about the fourth installment in the series, The Silver Chair? Duin reports:

Considering some of the weird remarks uttered by directors and producers of the first two films: “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” in 2005 and “Prince Caspian” in 2008, one wonders whether the will and determination exist to finish the seven-part Narnia series.

Will The Silver Chair and three other Narnia books come to life on the big screen? Well, we’ll just have to see how The Voyage of the Dawn Treader fares in theaters next December, won’t we? You can read Duin’s article here.

UPDATE: Click here to read Mark Sommer’s HJ Live! review of Duin’s article, called ”Is Narnia drifting from its Christian message?” You can also read what NarniaFans.com has to say about the Duin article here. They ask some important questions and favorably compare Lewis’s vision in the Narnia series to Tolkien’s in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. NarniaFans.com’s final thoughts?

Is Narnia drifting from its vision?

I’m going to say no, and there’s no reason to panic.  The film is about eleven months away, and the only thing we can do is wait and see.