Drinian orders all hands on deck and tells the archers to ready themselves against the threat that’s soaring across the water, from the island to the ship. It’s a dragon.
A weirdly cuddly looking dragon that appears to have been designed to sell bath toys. There are reasons for this to which I’ll get later but I’ve got to say the look of the creature is a disappointment to me. After circling around the ship, it lands on the mast.
“What’s it doing?” shrieks Lucy, hugging MLG. The archers fire at the beast. Their arrows don’t seem to wound it much, but they do annoy it. The dragon tries to fly away, then gets tangled up in the ropes and almost falls off. The fearless Reepicheep scampers up with his sword in his mouth and stabs the dragon in the hand. With a roar, it lets go, then remembers its wings and flies back to the island where it swoops down and grabs Edmund in its clutches. For no reason I can guess, it flies all the way back to the ship with him. “Edmund!” cries Lucy. “Lucy!” cries Edmund. Then the dragon immediately turns around and goes back to the island. (Maybe it’s trying to lure Lucy there?)
As Edmund looks down at the ground, he sees that the dragon has written “I AM EUSTACE” in giant flaming letters.
That’s right. This dragon is Eustace. In retrospect, I think the reason he doesn’t look as scary as the book described him is that the filmmakers wanted the dragon to still look a little like Eustace. A cool idea in theory but Will Poulter just doesn’t have a particularly scary, draconic face.
In the book, we see the scene of Eustace turning into a dragon from his point of view and we don’t share the crew’s fear when they see his new form. Keeping it a secret from viewers was arguably a fun idea on the movie’s part. It also arguably had some negative side effects on the story. I’ll get to those later. We cut to evening when Eustace is on the ground and Caspian, Lucy, Edmund and some others of the crew are gathered around him. Eustace is unsuccessfully trying to remove Lord Octesian’s armband from his foreleg for which it is now much too small. “He must have been tempted by the treasure,” says Edmund. “Well, anyone knows a dragon’s treasure is enchanted,” says Caspian. Eustace glowers at him. “Well, anyone from here,” he clarifies. Lucy cautiously goes forward and removes the painful clasp from Eustace’s leg. In the book, none of the crew ever does this and I’m baffled as to why the movie made this change. Not having the armband stuck to him makes Eustace’s dragon form less painful and means there’s less of an urgent need for him to go back to normal. Eustace also wasn’t able to communicate to the others who he was in the book. All he could do was convey that he understood their language and wanted to be friends. They only realized his exact identity by a lucky guess.[1]Eustace did try to explain what had happened to them by writing in the sand in the book but this didn’t work very well as the tide kept washing his words away. This movie spends so much time stressing the benefits of being a dragon that it neglects to show its downsides.
Edmund still wants to know if Eustace can be changed back though. Caspian says he doesn’t know how. “Aunt Alberta will not be pleased,” says Edmund. “Sorry about the hand, old boy,” Reepicheep says to Eustace. “I can be a little overzealous at times.” Now Reepicheep in the book never apologizes for being overzealous[2]Well, unless you count when he punishes Eustace for grabbing him by the tail and Eustace runs over to Caspian and his cousins. “”I ask your pardons all If I had known that he would take … Continue reading but I’m not totally scandalized by this. There are moments in the book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when Reepicheep surprises everyone by suggesting nonviolent solutions to problems, adding depth to his character. For example, when invisible enemies are threatening to kill everyone if Lucy doesn’t break the spell on them, he advocates letting her do so as she agrees to it, there’s no way they can save her and it’s not like she’s being asked to do anything wrong. And when a giant serpent loops its body around the Dawn Treader and everyone tries to stab it, he tells them to push its coils off. Since the movie doesn’t have those moments, it’s trying to nuance his character in another way. The minotaur announces that the longboats are ready to go back to the ship but Lucy objects that they can’t leave poor Eustace alone. “Well, we can’t bring him on board, Your Majesty,” says Drinian gently. “Drinian, you and the others take one boat back,” says Caspian, “The rest of us will stay here till morning and… work out what to do.” This time Rhince objects. “But you’ve no provisions. And no means of staying warm, Your Majesty.” Eustace responds by creating a campfire with a puff of his fiery breath. Everyone laughs appreciatively and Eustace looks slightly pleased with himself. This is true to the book in which, after becoming a dragon, Eustace experiences “The pleasure (quite new to him) of being liked and, still more, of liking other people.”
At night, as almost everyone else is seemingly asleep, Edmund and Caspian stare up at the sky. “I’ve never seen these constellations before,” says Edmund. “Me neither,” says Caspian, “We’re a long way from home. When I was a boy, I used to imagine sailing to the end of the world, finding my father there.” “Maybe you will,” says Edmund. The book makes a big deal of how the sky changes the nearer the Dawn Treader sails to the world’s end. This is the first time in quite a while the film has really acknowledged that they’re sailing there. It’s a nice moment. Caspian never says anything about looking for his dead father in the book and I don’t love the idea, but I don’t hate it either. It’s reasonable since they might be sailing to Aslan’s country and in the books, Aslan’s country is where the good guys go when they die. Longing to reunite with dead loved ones is an emotionally compelling theme and if the movie wanted to use it, I’m surprised they waited this long.
Later, MLG is fingering a necklace she has. On the end of it is a little carving of her mother’s face. “I miss my Mummy,” she says. Lucy rolls over to speak to her.
Lucy: I miss mine too. But don’t worry. You’ll see her again.
MLG: How do you know?
Lucy: You just have to have faith about these things. Aslan will help us.
Pause
MLG: But Aslan couldn’t stop her from being taken.
Lucy: We’ll find her, I promise. Somehow.
I appreciate that this dialogue exchange by having MLG question Alsan’s usefulness, gives her some characterization beyond cute-little-girl-who-misses-her-mom. The question of how Aslan and by implication, God can be all powerful and all benevolent when terrible things happen is potentially compelling. It’s also something that the last Narnia movie already explored in more depth whereas in this movie, it’s just a random throwaway moment. If the filmmakers really wanted these movies to resonate with Christians, I wish both of them would have supplied answers to the question. It’s not like Christian apologists have never offered explanations or defenses beyond “you just have to have faith about these things.”[3]I realize there are other religions that face this challenge too but I’m guessing Christians were mainly the ones the movie had in mind. The filmmakers may not agree with those counterarguments and when someone is in pain, no explanation is satisfying but they should acknowledge they exist. Then again, the fact that Lucy clearly struggles to find words to comfort MLG, suggesting she’s not completely assured in her own beliefs, does make her character more rounded and maybe lends the scene additional poignancy.
Still later, Reepicheep awakens to hear Eustace moaning and see a tear rolling down his face. I buy that here, but I would buy it even more if he had that armband still digging into his flesh. OK, I’ll stop harping on that.
“Now, now,” Reepicheep says gently, “all’s not as lost as it seems. I’ll stay up with you if you wish, keep you company. I’ll wager you didn’t even believe in dragons this morning. You know, extraordinary things only happen to extraordinary people.” That’s kind of a weird line. I’d say The Chronicles of Narnia are more about extraordinary things happening to ordinary people. Reepicheep suggests to Eustace that his transformation is a sign “that (he’s) got an extraordinary destiny, something greater than (he) could have imagined.” I’m not loving this writing. To be fair though, in this scene’s literary equivalent Reepicheep’s words of comfort to Eustace were also clunky.
The noble Mouse would creep away from the merry circle at the camp-fire and sit down by the dragon’s head, well to the windward to be out of the way of his smoky breath. There he would explain that what had happened to Eustace was a striking illustration of the turn of Fortune’s wheel, and that if he had Eustace at his own house in Narnia (it was really a hole not a house and the dragon’s head, let alone his body, would not have fitted in) he could show him more than a hundred examples of emperors, kings, dukes, knights, poets, lovers, astronomers, philosophers, and magicians, who had fallen from prosperity into the most distressing circumstances, and of whom many had recovered and lived happily ever afterwards.
However, those words were deliberately clunky on C. S. Lewis’s part. It was the thought behind them counted. (“It did not, perhaps, seem so very comforting at the time, but it was kindly meant and Eustace never forgot it.”) In the movie though, it seems like the words themselves are supposed to be profound when they’re just cheesy feelgood sentiments. In fact, it bugs me how much they’re about making Eustace feel good about himself. It’s true that his transformation ended up largely helping the crew, but it was also a punishment for him, not some sign that he was super special. The dragon’s ugliness was a reflection of Eustace’s character. It shamed him to look at his reflection. According to the book, “he was almost afraid to be alone with himself and yet he was ashamed to be with the others.” I realize such things are subjective but here he barely looks scary at all. Still, as Reepicheep begins to tell Eustace of some of his adventures and Eustace, instead of getting all grumpy, listens with interest, this is one of the movie’s better attempts at an emotional moment and not just the stuff with Eustace and Reepicheep. This whole starlit campfire scene is pretty nice. It’s been a long while since I’ve written about the film’s soundtrack since not much of it stands out to me as good or bad. But the music in this scene does stand out and in a good way.
Next Week: The Island of Ramandu
References
| ↑1 | Eustace did try to explain what had happened to them by writing in the sand in the book but this didn’t work very well as the tide kept washing his words away. |
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| ↑2 | Well, unless you count when he punishes Eustace for grabbing him by the tail and Eustace runs over to Caspian and his cousins. “”I ask your pardons all If I had known that he would take refuge here I would have awaited a more reasonable time for his correction.” |
| ↑3 | I realize there are other religions that face this challenge too but I’m guessing Christians were mainly the ones the movie had in mind. |