The Magician’s Bot Army

The trailer for Greta Gerwig’s long-awaited adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s “The Magician’s Nephew” has finally arrived, and it was, as expected, catastrophic.

Kaleidoscopic glimpses of alien worlds are sandwiched between dreary, dystopian shots of England, while Lewis’s beloved characters seem to have undergone their own disenchanting transformations.

Jadis, the future White Witch, bears a striking resemblance to Alice Cullen from “Twilight” and trounces around England wearing nothing but a disco ball, sparkly eyeliner, and a cheeky smirk. Then she blows up The Eagle and Child, the famous pub known for hosting Lewis and Tolkien as they sat for hours workshopping their stories together, smashing the very patriarchy she was born from.

Gerwig also appears to have reduced Uncle Andrew to nothing more than a harmless, eccentric old man whose ambition and thirst for power are all but gone, and whose cowardice is more a cutesy little quirk than a monstrous character flaw content with the possibility of sending two children to their deaths. Additionally, Diggory, portrayed in the novel as an opinionated, stubborn, determined boy, has been reduced to a slouching, mouth-breathing, passive, dim-witted child.

It was a failure those faithful to the novels had seen coming from a long way off. Once the first photos from the set of “The Magician’s Nephew” were released, it was obvious Gerwig had no intention of being faithful to the world Lewis had created.

Gerwig envisioned the movie as a sort of rock opera, so naturally she put feathers in Aslan’s mane, lichen on his nose, and gave him heterochromia. She shifted the book’s setting forward by a few decades. She cast a black actor as the first king of Narnia, despite the novels repeatedly describing the Narnians as a race recognizable by their fair, white skin. A distinction especially prevalent, even vital, to the plot of “A Horse and His Boy.” And she cast Meryl Streep to voice Aslan, a figure Lewis himself conceived of as Christ incarnate in Narnia.

However, if you posted about any of this on social media, you might have noticed something strange. The comment section quickly filled with nearly identical comments, echoed across multiple accounts. 

“You can’t judge a movie by its trailer.”

Excuse me? Isn’t that the entire point of a movie trailer?

It was odd, to say the least. Not only did the phenomenon seem anything but organic, suggesting a coordinated effort, but the argument itself didn’t even make logical sense. Moreover, the manufactured outrage over people daring to use their critical thinking skills was condemning in its own right and reminiscent of the cries of the hysterical masses during COVID.

However, the next day, reports emerged that sources within Netflix had described the film as testing so horribly with audiences that the studio reportedly ordered reshoots. Narnia lovers everywhere felt vindicated. 

But the question remains: Why does it seem like an entire bot army is tasked with bullying people into watching “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew”?

It’s an amusing strategy, to be sure, but it’s impotent. 

The love that fans have for “The Chronicles of Narnia” novels goes deeper than the literature itself. C.S. Lewis is a masterful storyteller, it’s true, but Narnia and Aslan do something for Christian readers that few other novels have ever achieved: they invite the reader into a deeper understanding of who their God is, who Jesus is, and who the reader is in relation to the order of the cosmos. 

This was Lewis’s explicit intent. If you fell in love with Aslan, you were falling in love with the character of Christ. 

Every novel offered a deeper understanding of a different aspect of Aslan’s nature, and so readers came to know him better. As the novels progressed, so did their theological concepts, until readers found themselves face-to-face with their own mortality, demons, and eternal consequences. 

Gerwig seems to have bypassed all of that and created her own “Tashlan,” a counterfeit Aslan no more convincing than a donkey in a lion’s skin. She has taken Narnia, scooped out its insides, and inserted her own ideology, beliefs, wants, and desires. What remains of Lewis’s Narnia is just a macabre shell, with Gerwig the parasite within. She has “reimagined” the original novel out of existence and created an entirely new story. 

Which is fine. It’s a free country.

But you can’t act surprised when you offer someone reimagined chocolate chip cookies where the chocolate chips are actually raisins, and nobody wants them.

***

Alicia Bittle is a writer for Evie Magazine.

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