There have, of course, been comings and goings between our world and the land of Narnia for a very long time. Back in the old days, one needed to sift through the joyfully chaotic polyester costumes of the BBC miniseries version of “The Silver Chair” on a properly heavy old television set to really see them, or burrow under the covers clutching a cassette player, the better to imagine hidden worlds made vivid in the sound effects of the Brian Sibley radio drama. Certain Millennial children watched the DVD extras related to James McAvoy’s Mr. Tumnus with a kind of awe they wouldn’t quite understand until they were much older — to say nothing of the great open door provided by the set of white paperback books, ordered the way writer C.S. Lewis preferred, beginning with “The Magician’s Nephew.”
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But writer and director Greta Gerwig has now made it all as big as a lion.
On Tuesday morning in New York City, Gerwig spoke to an IMAX theater full of writers and reporters (including a couple of intrepid IndieWire staffers) to launch the trailer and several behind-the-scenes features for “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew,” in advance of the trailer’s online release. She admitted — to the room and to once-and-future host and moderator Stephen Colbert — that she only knows how to create visual stories for the big screen. She needs as big a screen as possible, which explains why she fought so hard and won, if not The Last Battle, then a huge victory for a theatrical release for her adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ stories of a land of talking animals and evil witches and (occasionally) Father Christmas that runs just parallel to our own.
You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get the Led Zeppelin track that you need; Gerwig also said that she went to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page to utilize “Stairway to Heaven,” which is seldom licensed, but has come a long way in culture from being seen as part of the Satanic panic to, in the trailer, being the backing for the moment that the great lion Aslan (played by the great lion Meryl Streep) sings Narnia into creation. Even from the scant footage available in the trailer, Gerwig has taken a deliberately exuberant, psychedelic approach to the world of Narnia’s creation — and to the beauty of creation, generally.
The story of “The Magician’s Nephew” follows new friends Polly Plummer (Beatrice Campbell) and Digory Kirke (David McKenna), who discover that Digory’s uncle Andrew Ketterley (Daniel Craig) may be just crazy enough to have concocted a way to move between infinite worlds. There’s a mix of large-scale sets and dizzying VFX that we’ve all become quite accustomed to from big fantasy epics, but Gerwig said she was excited to put them toward a very different sort of use. Normally, she noted, movies are blowing things up and destroying whole cityscapes and turning the ground itself into Minecraft blocks. “The Magician’s Nephew” puts all that towards creating things, growing things, and helping things (like a horse named Fledge) take flight.
Polly and Digory’s adventures in worldbuilding will have repercussions in more than just Narnia; as seen in the trailer, Emma Mackey’s Jadis, who looks more than ready to Dance the Night in disco-ified, shining armor, is set loose on London, among many other strange goings-on. Every universe’s beginning also holds the seeds of its end. But Gerwig has assembled a pair of compelling young leads, and a supporting cast as in love with Lewis’ work as she is — including Craig, Mackey, Streep, Carey Mulligan, Ciaran Hinds, Kobna Goldbrook-Smith, and Denis Gough.
All the rest of us need are some magic rings and/or the film‘s theatrical release on February 12. Watch the full trailer for “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” below.