Hacker Cinema
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
2005 · Film · 143 min
Part of The Chronicles of Narnia Collection
Directed by Andrew Adamson
Four kids travel through a wardrobe to the land of Narnia and learn of their destiny to free it with the guidance of a mystical lion.
1 positive4 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
I differentiate nerd from geek as a heirarchy, geek to me being a sub-nerd.
These are geekisms:
>super heroes
>fantasy books/movies
>Pokemon
>Magic the Gathering
>Star Wars
>Lord Of The Rings
>Narnia
>Harry Potter
>video games
Here you describe nerdisms:
>When I was little I was fascinated by big engines and in general driven by the curiosity of wanting to know how everything worked. I would disassemble every piece of electronics in the household. I was into model airplanes and gliders. I was obsessed with building electric motors. I was also really big into steam machines. Everything steam was just cool. Then computers took over my life. Today I find myself nerding out about wood working and back garden agriculture when I'm not doing AI stuff.
Geeks consoom, nerds understand and tinker/build.
Most video games are geek (consoom), tools like Siemens NX or Adobe Master Collection CS6 are nerd (should be thought of as extremely open-ended games), simulators wobble between my classifications depending on accuracy/depth (Minecraft, Sims: geek; NX Nastran, flight/train/truck/forklift simulators: nerd).
I don't know why publishers keep insisting on chronological ordering of fantasy/SF book sets. Don't they understand literature? A lot of novels are not chronologically ordered, even within one book.
Would you introduce someone to Tolkien and tell them to start with The Silmarillion? Absolutely not.
Fortunately, film and TV producers seem to know what works better. IIRC I've watched at least two Narnia movie franchises, and both started with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and proceeded in publication order. They usually don't go beyond The Silver Chair, though. Which was probably the right decision, because the remaining three books feel more like Hollywood milking the franchise with contrived prequels, sequels, and spinoffs than a proper part of the same canon.
"Really, all science fiction is a subset of fantasy. "science fantasy" is just science fiction that isn't actually about the science, which is the bulk of the genre."
All fiction is fantasy. Fantasy is the root of all fiction. As soon as one starts to change reality, by lying about what someone said or thinking about what you could have said, that's fantasy.
All labels are either useful fuzzy groupings or non-useful groupings. "High fantasy" is a label that gets you works closer in some conceptual space to The Lord of the Rings than to The Manchurian Candidate. "Isekai" is a very definite label that applies to The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe and does not apply to Space Quest, but it applies more to Space Quest than to most episodes of Star Trek (except The City On The Edge of Forever, which is definitely isekai, and some similar episodes.)
"Science fiction" is a marketing promise that if there are elves, there will be an evolutionary heritage for them and a reason that you don't notice them walking to your local pub (no guarantees about the walk back.) Spock is a kind of half-space-elf. The space elves split into two groups a long time ago -- the ones who subscribed to a rationalist approach, and the ones who had a religion based on passion.
According to Rotten Tomatoes, both critics and audiences thought Chronicles was simply a better movie. Unless you think the critics were somehow swayed by protestors? Seems unlikely.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/his_dark_materials_the_golden_compass/
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chronicles_of_narnia_lion_witch_wardrobe/
There's good and bad publicity, and while the line might be blurred for software startups, it's fairly clear for film studios. Pissing off the conservative crowd in North America comes with some consequences for an entertainment/media company.
Case in point: The Golden Compass. The studio was shooting for a $30 million dollar opening weekend. They grossed something like $8.8 mil. You might recall that leading up to the opening there was a lot discussion (and a few calls for protests) surrounding some of the material in the books.
Compare/contrast "The Chronicles of Narnia". Both movies had similar budgets and targeted the same audience. Chronicles wasn't burdened by a bunch of controversy and pulled in ~$20 mil on the opening weekend.