Remember the old Narnia films? Wet English countryside, children in knitted jumpers, everyone speaking in the hushed tones of a Sunday school that’s also a library. Lovely. Earnest. About as glitzy as a cup of milky tea.
Well, put the tea down. Greta Gerwig has arrived, and she’s brought sequins.
Netflix has unveiled the first trailer for The Magician’s Nephew, Gerwig’s take on the first Narnia book in chronological order. ” It opens, naturally, with Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, a song released eight years after Lewis died and roughly 8,000 miles from anything he would have played on his gramophone. (Fun fact: Zeppelin were famously obsessed with Tolkien. Right Oxford pub, wrong Inkling.)
Then comes Daniel Craig as Uncle Andrew Ketterley, the magician of the title, solemnly declaring that some stories are the start of all the others while handing children enchanted rings like a Bond villain running a very irresponsible after-school club. The rings whisk young Digory and Polly (newcomers David McKenna and Beatrice Campbell) out of Edwardian England and into the Wood Between Worlds, a sort of cosmic hotel corridor full of doors to other dimensions. There they witness Narnia being born, and meet Jadis (Emma Mackey), the White Witch in her pre-winter era.
And Aslan? Voiced by Meryl Streep. Enough said.
Gerwig, for her part, insists this is a love letter. She told a New York premiere crowd she can’t remember not knowing the books, and that she wouldn’t be who she is without them. She also personally persuaded Robert Plant and Jimmy Page to hand over Stairway, explaining the song is about choosing between good and evil, a spiritual quest. Which, to be fair, is the most Lewis thing anyone has said about a Led Zeppelin track.
Still, you have to wonder. Lewis’s book is a strange, quiet, deeply religious little creation story. Its big set piece is a lion singing stars into the sky in total darkness. Lewis himself was wary of anyone filming his talking animals, fretting they’d come out either silly or terrifying. It’s hard to imagine him signing off on a stadium-rock trailer and a $1bn-Barbie-director rollout, complete with Netflix’s first-ever global cinema release (eight weeks in theatres from 12 February, streaming from 2 April). Gerwig says Ted Sarandos told her to make it for the biggest screen possible. Lewis, one suspects, would have asked for a smaller one and a nice pipe.
But here’s the twist: The Magician’s Nephew is secretly the funniest Narnia book. Uncle Andrew is a pompous coward, and Jadis literally rampages through Victorian-era London on a hansom cab, ripping a lamppost off its base like a pantomime Godzilla. If any Narnia story could handle a little glitter, it’s this one.
So is it what Lewis was really about? Probably not. Is it going to be enormous fun to argue about? Absolutely. Further up and further in.
Bring sunglasses.