The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010) Part 7: This Place Has Tempted You!

The sun rises and the Dawn Treader arrives at another island. “I doubt the lords stopped here, my liege,” says Reepicheep as he and other crewmembers head towards the shore in one of two longboats. “There’s no sign of anything living.” Indeed, this island has a very dry, rocky climate. It’s actually a combination of two islands from the book, neither of which were described that way. I sympathize with the change though. The last island we saw was quite lush and it’s nice to have a variety of environments. I do think though that the way C. S. Lewis described the islands made it more believable that the crew would be able to keep gathering supplies for their voyage, which Caspian here tells Reepicheep is their reason for landing. “Once we get ashore, take your men and search for food and water,” he calls from the other longboat. “The three of us will look for clues.” Eustace, who is in the same longboat as Caspian, Lucy and Edmund objects. “Hang on. You mean the four of us.” Everyone looks at him.

Eustace: Come on, please don’t send me back to the rat!
Reepicheep: I heard that!
Eustace (muttering): Big ears!
Reepicheep: I heard that too!

We cut to later. As the crew unloads, Eustace sneaks away from them. Elsewhere, the three royals explore the island. Caspian finds a rope tied around a giant rock, the end of which trails down into a hole in the ground. “The lords?” suggests Edmund. “Could be,” says Caspian. He drops a small stone down the hole, and they listen to the echo of it falling to ascertain the depth. Then they climb down the rope ladder to explore.

After a bit, they find a pool with a golden statue of a man in it. In the book, this pool is aboveground but, again, I sympathize with the change of location. This underground cavern, lit only by holes from the ground above, makes for a cool set. Edmund breaks off a giant root from the cave wall and dips it into the pool. Beginning with the tip that touches the water, the wood transforms into gold! Just before the gold spreads to his fingers, Edmund cries out in fear and drops the root. It sinks to the bottom of the pool. Now in the book, if you dipped something like that in the water, only the part that was submerged would turn to gold, but I guess I’m OK with the change. It does make a for a nice creepy moment here.

Our heroes bend down to examine the underwater statue which they now realize isn’t a statue.

Caspian: He must have fallen in.
Lucy: Poor man.
Edmund: You mean poor lord.

Edmund has noticed the man’s golden shield. Caspian recognizes the design on it as “the crest of Lord Restimar” and Edmund points out his sword. “We need it,” Caspian says. OK, aren’t they being kind of glib here? I get Caspian probably never knew Lord Restimar personally; he was just searching for him out of duty and, of course, getting his sword is vital to saving the Lone Islands. I don’t think the movie needed a big funeral scene for this character or even a big moment of silence, but it still feels kind of tasteless to pass over him this quickly. Couldn’t they have had a little moment of silence? Anyway, Edmund uses the sword he got from Lord Bern to lift Restimar’s sword out of the water and-oh no! There’s that Green Mist again! It feels like whenever there’s a scene in this movie that’s like the book and I, as a fan of the source material, start to relax and enjoy it, the Mist will show up and snap me out of it. Also, the quality of the scenes strangely tends to drop after the it appears even when that dropping doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the Mist itself. This bit is a case in point.

Edmund succeeds in retrieving the sword and Lucy notes that neither it nor his own has turned to gold. “Both the swords are magical,” says Caspian. Neither he nor Lucy is onscreen when they say those lines, so I suspect they were added in post-production in response to viewers of test screenings making the same observation as Lucy. It’s nice that they realized there was one confusing plot point they needed to clarify anyway. Lucy seems to agree with me that Lord Restimar isn’t getting enough respect. “He mustn’t have known what hit him,” she says as she stares at his golden remains. “Maybe,” says Edmund, “Or maybe he was on to something.” On to something? If Restimar had perished trying to dip something into the water, that line would make sense but, judging from his pose, he was cupping his hands to get a drink.

Edmund takes a nearby seashell and dips it in the pool, turning it to gold. He stares at it like he’s under a spell.

Edmund: Whoever has access to this pool could be the most powerful person in the world. Lucy, we’d be so rich! No one could tell us what to do or who to live with!
Caspian: You can’t take anything out of Narnia, Edmund.
Edmund: Says who?

That’s a good question actually. I don’t remember it being established in either the books or the movies that no one from this world could take things from the world of Narnia. The only reason to believe this is the Pevensies’ Narnian clothes being replaced with their English ones when they return^[1]In the movies, not always in the books. and I’m not sure if it makes sense for Caspian to know about that. Anyway, back to the conversation.

Edmund: Says who?
Caspian: I do.
Edmund: I’m not your subject.
Caspian: You’ve been waiting for this, haven’t you? To challenge me. You doubt my leadership!
Edmund: You doubt yourself.
Caspian: You’re a child!
Edmund: And you’re a spineless sap!
Lucy: Edmund-
Edmund: I’m tired of playing second fiddle! First it was Peter and now it’s you. You know I’m braver than both of you! Why do you get Peter’s sword? I deserve a kingdom of my own! I deserve to rule!
Caspian: If you think you’re so brave, prove it!

Now it tends to bug me when critics disparage works of art by saying the artists just made it for a paycheck and didn’t really care about the quality. How do they know that? It seems to discount the possibility of artists trying to make great art and failing through a lack of taste. For that matter, does it ever occur to the critics that the works of art they love and into which they believe the artists put their hearts and souls might have actually been made by artists who were just going through the motions but had enough talent to make something great anyway? How do we know the critics aren’t just projecting their own feelings about the art onto the artists? So I try to avoid making those kinds of statements on this blog but it’s hard to resist with these Narnia movies because…I really do think Andrew Adamson, the director of the first two, put a lot of passion into them whereas Michael Apted, the director of this third one, didn’t. Mind you, I don’t consider everything about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) or Prince Caspian (2008) great, but I believe that Adamson thought they were great and was trying to make the greatest movies he could even when I disagree with his taste. With Michael Apted, well, I’m sure he wished to avoid making an outright bad movie. Sheer professional pride forbad him that. But I don’t get the impression he was trying to make the greatest movie possible. It feels like he just wanted to wrap up filming as quickly as possible every day so he could go home and do his laundry, and that attitude trickled down to the whole crew. Well, not the whole crew. Some people did great work on the movie, but I imagine the credit goes to those individuals, not to Michael Apted’s leadership.

And the nice thing about this scene is that it allows me to give specific reasons for this impression beyond just “I liked the other movies better.” Caspian and Edmund are supposedly going through the same experience here, but their actors portray it entirely differently. Skandar Keynes snarls and hams it up like he’s transforming into Mr. Hyde. Ben Barnes, on the other hand, gives a subtly creepy performance, making it hard to say when exactly Caspian starts going crazy.^[2]To be fair, that may just be because his dialogue is relatively less heavy handed. It feels like Apted had no particular vision for the scene and just let the actors do whatever they wanted. If you ask me, he should have been telling Keynes to follow Barnes’s example.

Caspian and Edmund start to sword fight, but Lucy gets between them. “Stop it!” she cries. “Both of you! Look at yourselves. Can’t you see what’s happening? This place has tempted you! It’s bewitching you! This is exactly what Coriakin was talking about.” OK, who would say “this place has tempted you” even if that’s what they were trying to express? To me, it feels like the screenwriters, being unable to see an overriding theme in the original book, showed admirable humility by asking some Christians they knew who told them it was about temptation.^[3]That’s not what I’d call the main theme of the story by the way but it’s not totally wrong. But they didn’t actually have anything interesting to say about temptation, besides “it sure is bad, isn’t it,” so this just comes across as a shallow attempt to appeal to Christian audiences.^[4]Along similar lines, Lucy’s subplot feels like the screenwriters heard that young girls tend to be insecure about their looks and wanted to address that without actually having an interesting … Continue reading Incidentally, in the book, it was Aslan who intervened to save Edmund and Caspian from themselves. If the movie really wanted to tell a Christian story, it probably should have kept that. Still, I can see the appeal of Lucy, having recently mastered her own temptation, being the one to snap the others out of theirs. It’s one of the movie’s few subtle attempts at character development “Let’s just get out here,” she says. They follow her advice. Before he leaves, a chastened Edmund tosses the golden seashell away. I’ve been pretty hard on this movie for the last three paragraphs or so, so I’ll say that’s a good visual way to show the magic pool no longer has power over him.

Now back to being hard on it. This is a good time to ask how come the Mist doesn’t try devouring our heroes as it did the sacrificial victims on the Lone Islands? Tempting them doesn’t seem to be working that well. I’d say that the Mist gets more powerful the closer one gets to Dark Island and the characters simply aren’t near enough yet for it to do something like that. But then how was it able to devour those people all the way back at the Lone Islands? Can it only do that to those who have deliberately been sacrificed? But then why were they being sacrificed in the first place? Yeah, this is the Narnia movie that benefits the most from not thinking about it. To be fair, there are things about the other movies and even the original books that also benefit from a lack of thought but this one really takes the cake.

We find Eustace wandering around the island and complaining about the silliness of the plot. I love it when he does that. “Oh yes,” he rants, “follow the imaginary blue star to the island of Raman-doo-doo! Lay the seven steak knives at the table of the talking lion! Hmph! Ninnies!” Just then, Eustace finds a shallow canyon, the ground of which is covered with golden treasures.

“I must be dead!” he breathes. Once he recovers from shock, he grabs a golden bowl and starts filling it with loot. His eye is drawn to a golden armband though he screams when he sees it’s on the arm of a finely dressed skeleton. “Your definitely dead,” he says before ripping the band off and putting it on his own arm. “Won’t be needing that then, will you?” A strange roaring/hissing noise is heard. Eustace looks around nervously but when he doesn’t hear it again, he goes back to collecting treasure. In the book, Eustace finds this trove in the cave of an old dragon he sees die, who may or may not have been one of the seven missing lords under an enchantment. Presumably, that’s what made the noise here though we never see it and it’s probably confusing if you haven’t read the book. Unseen by Eustace, the Green Mist surges. Now I’m really annoyed. It made sense that the Mist would want Lucy to accidentally make it so she never went to Narnia or that it would want either Edmund or Caspian to the kill the other. But how does it benefit from Eustace robbing the dead? As we’ll see, it actually makes him an asset to the Dawn Treader’s crew in their attempts to destroy the Mist.^[5]Maybe the Mist just can’t resist tempting everyone even when doing so doesn’t benefit it. That would be an interesting weakness if that was the movie’s intention. This is the kind of thing that happens when people put a villain into a story that didn’t have one. They tend to just blame everything bad on the villain even when it doesn’t make sense for them to be responsible. In the book by the way, the scene with the water that turned things to gold took place after this and Eustace was present. The fact that he was one of the only ones not to be tempted by the prospect of unlimited riches subtly showed his character development so it’s too bad the chronology was changed for this movie. Still, that’s hardly the worst bit of artistic license here.

Caspian, Edmund and Lucy return to the longboats. Rhince shows them the meagre food his party has found. “It’s volcanic, Your Majesty,” he says apologetically, “Not much grows.” (See what I mean about it making more sense in the book how the ship never ran out of supplies?)

Lucy looks around. “Where’s Eustace?” she asks. “I believe he’s out not helping us load the boats,” says Reepicheep. Lucy calls Eustace’s name. There’s no response unless you count the noise of a hot air blast from somewhere on the island’s surface. “Edmund, I’ve got a bad feeling,” Lucy says. Her line delivery makes it sound less like she’s worried something’s happened to her cousin and more like she’s going to throw up. Edmund goes to search for Eustace and Caspian, wanting to make amends, volunteers to go with him. They find the same glittering hoard that Eustace found. “Treasure?” says Edmund. “Trouble,” says Caspian. They investigate and discover Eustace’s clothes, and his diary charred.

“I’m sorry,” Caspian tells Edmund. “He was just a boy! I never should have left him!” Edmund, who was already feeling guilt stricken about his behavior over that alchemical pool, says. “What could have happened to him?” Caspian looks around warily. “In this place, anything and he wasn’t the first. ” He goes over to the skeleton. “It’s Lord Octesian,” he says, “We should find his-” But Edmund has already picked up the man’s magical sword. Again, it’d be nice to show a little more respect for the dead before taking their stuff. Just a tad.

Meanwhile, Lucy and the others are back on board the Dawn Treader. They hear a strange roar coming from the island. “What was that?” she asks Drinian. A burst of flame is visible from the crags. “Is it the volcano?” MLG asks. “Oh, no,” says Drinian grimly, “that’s no volcano.”

Next Week: A Dragon!