The Dawn Treader

I was hoping to love the movie, The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader.  I really was.  Unfortunately, I did not.

Beware ... spoiler alerts lurking.

It is always risky to make a movie about a great book.  There are those purists who are unforgiving about the slightest deviation from the original story.  I am not one of those.

I actually liked the movie adaptations of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian.

There were changes but they were acceptable in my opinion.  The major thrust of the story made it through.

Unfortunately, things went south with The Voyage of The Dawn Treader.  There were numerous changes from the book.  That was bothersome, but it was the nature of the changes that caused me to truly not like this movie.  They reworked a story of redemption and turned it into an entirely different story -- one of a quest for magical objects, and a story of good versus evil.

The original story revolves around one major story of redemption ... of Eustace ... along with the redemption of the Lone Islands from the slave trade and Governor Gumpas ... the redemption of both the Dufflepuds and Corakin (himself a fallen star like Ramandu) ... the redemption of Lord Rhoop ... the redemption of Lucy ... the redemption of the sleeping Lords ... and the redemption of Caspian.

Of course, the central story of the transformation of Eustace early on in the book by the grace of Aslan was the most moving part of the entire epic.  In the movie, it was tacked on at the end in a lame fashion.  It had Aslan scratching sand to get the dragon skin off Eustace.  It was weird and anticlimactic at best.

The other moving part of the book is Reepicheep's steadfast determination to make it to Aslan's country.  Thankfully this was retained in the movie.

The stuff about the magical seven swords and green mist monsters and human sacrifice was a complete distraction to the