A 2nd chance to appreciate `Narnia' virtues

When The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, opened for Christmas 2005, it faced off with an actual 800-pound gorilla: Peter Jackson's King Kong.

Jackson, coming off one of the most imaginative and audacious of all escapist movie classics -- his beloved and hugely profitable Lord of the Rings trilogy -- was tackling a remake of his and many other fans' favorite fantasy adventure. The creative stakes were as high as movie-lovers' hopes, with casting choices that veered between the brave (Jack Black, Adrien Brody) and the indisputably wise (Naomi Watts) and the tantalizing decision to create not an update of the original but an all-out 1930s period piece.

Unlike King Kong, the first Narnia movie was prejudged in the shadow of the Harry Potter movies as well as Lord of the Rings. What were the odds that a Hollywood studio could take on a third British magic-literature series and serve it even halfway right? With Andrew Adamson of the beguiling Shrek and the bogus Shrek 2 taking on directing chores, the screen hardly seemed set for an auteur classic. The buzz Narnia generated came from C.S. Lewis buffs who worried over the movie's fidelity to his books and secular bloggers who suspected the producers of Christian proselytizing.

Given the expectations game that rules entertainment news as well as political coverage, King Kong was deemed a disappointing blockbuster -- though Watts and Brody were wonderful, the re-creation of Depression New York and old-time filmmaking miraculous, and the climactic scenes absurdly, tumultuously moving. The excesses of the creature-feature Skull Island scenes turned off some audiences and critics (myself included) and gave off the whiff of energetic self-indulgence.

By contrast, viewers of all kinds embraced The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for its robust storytelling, nonpreachy morality and unassuming visual splendor. Still, Adamson didn't get the credit he deserved, partly because he approached both his real work and his publicity with becoming modesty. Critics viewed him more as a custodian than as an interpreter of Lewis' fiction -- less like Jackson transforming J.R.R. Tolkien into pure cinema and more like Chris Columbus preserving the letter of J.K. Rowling's text in the amiable, mediocre early Harry Potter films.