Question: What about the religious references in the film's climatic final battle and that line, 'it is finished.' That's taken straight from the bible.

Adamson: No not intentionally.

Question: It is Finished are words from the Cross.

Adamson: I actually honestly didn't know that. Seriously, I can't believe I didn't know that. The thing that I wanted and the thing I was really going for is for Aslan's sadness and having to get to this point -- there's a moment where Aslan and the White Witch stare at each other at the end as if they're both accepting their fate. He's going to have to kill her. She accepts that she's going to be killed. And to me I didn't want to send home the message that war is an ideal solution. I wanted Aslan to actually regret the fact that he's going to have to kill the White Witch. I wanted a line that he could turn to and really just say -- it's over. It's done.

• One reason why comparisons to Lord of the Rings will ring hollow is that this movie sticks to the book like glue. Whereas Peter Jackson made significant narrative changes to the story up to and including removing whole characters and rearranging major plot points and rewriting the dialogue so that hardly a single word remained verbatim to the book, Narnia seems to have preserved every last page for the screen, and the only significant changes the screenwriters made were to add bits here and there to flesh out the narrative and the character development (the WWII-context prologue, the escape through the beavers' tunnel, the Rupert Everett fox, Edmund meeting Tumnus in the Witch's prison and having to endure her "outing" his betrayal, etc). Almost nothing was deleted, and most of the dialogue and even the action (like Peter's fight with the Wolf) is straight off the page. Yet sticking to the text seems to have worked really well in this movie, whereas past attempts to do the same thing with Tolkien have always fallen flat. I think maybe this is just a result of Lewis' writing being more visual and less ponderously historical, as well as his universe-building being far more whimsical. Though some might lump them into the same general bucket, Narnia makes Lord of the Rings look like Saving Private Ryan.
  
  
• The attention to detail and preservation of every little atmospheric observation in the book was astonishing, right down to the dead blue-bottle on the windowsill. (I guess part of this is the fact that there's so little text to work with in this movie—you can pretty much read the book in three hours, which is certainly not the case with Tolkien; so they could afford to leave everything in this time and even linger a bit over details.)
  
  
• I'd been interested to see whether they would have used the British or the American version of the book as their original source material; the way to know this was the name of the chief wolf, which in the British version was Maugrim, but was changed inexplicably to "Fenris Ulf" for the American version. They used Maugrim in the movie. If they do the sequels, they might have to confront additional editorial changes between the versions.
  
  
• Speaking of sequels—they seem to be fully on-board to do them, but I can't imagine how it'll work. Some of the books are so episodic and provincial that they hardly contribute to the overall storyline, and I can't see a story like The Silver Chair being marketed with anything like the same name-recognition or iconic vigor. (Aslan is barely even in that one, and the characters are all new.) I'd almost rather see them not do the sequels at all rather than risk them turning into low-budget direct-to-video releases. Besides, can you imagine them producing The Horse and His Boy today—or even The Last Battle? Forget the Christian significance, CAIR would be all up on Adamson's ass over the Calormenes.
  
  
• I'm very impressed with the handling of the tone of the story from scene to scene. Tension is built up expertly and defused at just the right moments. Tone is what would make or break this movie; it's what would make the Stone Table scene either uplifting or overbearing, or Edmund's betrayal of the others either poignant or infuriatingly petty. But it's all done with just the right touch. The perfect illustration of this is the Santa Claus scene, which I'd been anticipating they'd cut out entirely, just like Tom Bombadil—who ever heard of trying to make a serious fantasy movie with Santa Claus in it? —And yet they made it work, largely by never mentioning his name, and making him look very different from the usual American pop-culture vision of him (more of a medieval Father Christmas figure). Reading that scene in the book was jarring enough, and I thought seeing it on the screen would make it all the more ludicrous; but I found myself taking in the scene without any cognitive dissonance at all. Kudos to the director on this one.
  
  
• And kudos as well to the cinematographer! I don't know if it's just that New Zealand looks that way or what, but there seems to be something about it that lends itself to these extreme telephoto establishing shots from helicopters, which Narnia has in spades, especially during the battle scenes. (I can only guess at how they kept the shot so steady.) Pretty much any still-frame in the whole battle sequence could be made into a calendar shot. Gorgeous, gorgeous work. Peter Jackson used shots like this, only more sparingly and more spread out; but they're all over the place in this movie, and I couldn't get enough of them. I only worry that that kind of telephoto composition will become a cliché, just because it worked so well here that now everyone's going to use it.
  
  
• Speaking of clichés, it's getting so it's hard to do an "And then the armies collided" scene in a new and unique way, isn't it? Lord of the Rings already had the sturm-and-drang-style cavalry charge full of yelling and hoofbeats and clanging iron; and it also did the artsy "no sound but someone singing sadly in the foreground while a salvo of arrows descends on the vanguard" style, too, both within the same movie. But Narnia tried its best to go its own way, with the swelling music fading away into silence just as the front lines met. Very effective. Unfortunately, someone also decided that that very moment was also the perfect time to do a reel switch, which kind of ruined the effect a bit. This will be something to see on DVD.
  
  
• Great casting all around. I can't think of a character who didn't perfectly match my expectations—which may owe something to the fact that the character designs seem to have been modeled on Pauline Baynes' original illustrations, so that everyone—right down to the Witch's dwarf—looked how I expected them to. The Professor didn't get much face-time in the book, but he was expertly fleshed out on screen, and his last line before the coda is a perfect end to the episode. (I'm a little lukewarm on the stinger scene in the credits; it seemed a little unnecessary, or at least the trailing roar was.)