The dark side of Narnia

Adamson’s latest chronicle captures the high-stakes battle for Aslan’s kingdom | Megan Basham

Caspian, Peter and Edmund

In The Decay of Lying, Oscar Wilde wrote that "there is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true." When it comes to creating art, one can lose the spirit of a work by focusing too much on fact.

In their first collaborative attempt to bring C.S. Lewis' beloved Chronicles of Narnia to life on screen, Walden Media and Disney seemed to suffer something along the same lines; 2005's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was technically good—the effects were first-rate, the cast (both the long-time Oscar favorites and the fresh-faced newcomers) inhabited their parts admirably, and (as the filmmakers repeatedly pointed out when it was first released) the movie stuck to the book scene for scene.