When I turned twenty-one, lo these many years ago, one of the best gifts I received was a beautifully bound box set of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Reading those books then, after so many years, I was captivated anew by their magic, even though I had, in the intervening years, become aware of the whole Christian allegory, Aslan-as-Jesus thing that had totally gone over my head as a youngster. I loved them. I still love them. But I have no idea how I missed all the religious symbolism.

I am almost positive that I wouldn’t have missed it had this movie version existed when I was a child still. The last ten or fifteen minutes of it feel like a particularly well animated and animal-laden episode of Touched by an Angel, not to mention all the “Lead ye not into temptation” stuff that comes before it. But if you can ignore the heavy handedness of the underlying message (seriously, I never got it? I hadn’t realized I was such a backward child), then this is a pretty enjoyable -- though hardly perfect -- film.

It’s also a very different film to its two predecessors in the series, 2005’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and 2008’s Prince Caspian. There is way less wholesale slaughter here for a start; sure, battles are fought and lives are lost, but it’s not nearly as bloody-but-strangely-bloodless, as the previous two Narnia installments. (And yet is way more action-oriented than the book.) The choices made here by director Michael Apted -- yep, the Gorillas in the Mist guy -- are much more magical-quest Harry Potter with shades of Pirates of the Caribbean than the Braveheartiness of the first movie, or the Gladiator-esque palace intrigue of the second. (Which also differed from the source material significantly.)

And speaking of Harry Potter… one thing this movie highlights yet again is just how lucky those Hogwarts-adjacent folks were in their child casting.

Georgie Henley and Skandar Keynes (cool name, huh?) as the now teenaged Lucy and Edmund are perfectly fine, but they’re no Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe. Of course, neither are they William Moseley, whose mincing turn as Peter, High King of Narnia in Prince Caspian has to have been the least convincing attempt at kick ass royalty since David Spade voiced that enchanted llama in The Emperor’s New Groove.

One piece of good fortune this time out was the casting of Will Poulter as the priggish and irksome Pevensie cousin, Eustace, who brings the funny in a less likeable Ron Weasley kind of way. And Ben Barnes as Prince Caspian was already pretty hot in his titular outing a couple of years back; now King Caspian, he’s even hotter, what with his manly designer beard and his no longer being hampered by that pseudo-Spanish accent. As fantasy movie kings go, he’s no Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, but he’s definitely up there on the list (all of whom pale in that particular comparison, it must be said).

Another little something that definitely goes in this movie’s plus column is its marvelous special effects. They’re fantastic… in the non-3D version. (In 3D, it’s like you’re watching the movie through fingerprint-smudged sunglasses -- as opposed to, you know, the fingerprint-smudged 3D ones. Dark and blurry. Avoid.) There’s this one scene, where some kind of sea sprite is cavorting alongside the Dawn Treader, and it is a moment so incandescent you’ll want to relive it over and over. (Not in the 3D, though. In the 3D it just looks kind of like a rogue wave kicked up by the ship’s hull.)

Oh, yeah. The Dawn Treader. Did I mention that yet? No? Indeed, it occurs to me that I have yet to mention the plot of this movie at all -- but on second thought, I don’t think much of that is really necessary, do you? Essentially, two of the Pevensie children -- AKA King Edmund the Just and Queen Lucy the Valiant of Narnia -- are brought out of WWII London and into their magical realm away from home to aid in the destruction of an insidious evil that threatens all they hold dear. Their tiresome young cousin Eustace tags along. He turns into a dragon, and learns humility (becoming way less funny in the process). They spend a lot of time voyaging aboard ship, the Dawn Treader of the title. There’s a sea serpent. Jesu… I mean, Aslan the lion turns up to save the day. Hurrah! Throw in a little rodent suicide. End.

Lewis purists will hardly be pleased by, well, any of the changes wrought in this adaptation. Not only in the vast swathes of action and in Caspian’s brute force attitude to most everything, but also in a whole seven-swords-to-save-us-all subplot and a malicious green mist that bears little relationship to anything seen in the novel. They even messed with the aforementioned rodent suicide! But if you can find it in you to let this movie’s faithlessness slide (and if I can do it, anyone can), then The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is, put simply, adequately entertaining.

I don’t hold out much hope for a movie of the next book in the series, The Silver Chair, considering this one’s poor box office showing, but I dare to dream; it’s a Eustace story, you see, and I really did like that pesky little brat here, at least before he got all mawkish. I can only pray to Aslan that it may someday be given to us to see his and Jill Pole’s (kudos on the Jill reference, movie!) Narnian story unfold.

Amen.

  -- Rachel Hyland