--- description: Here's a little secret: most 3-D movies aren't in 3-D. I don't mean that they were shot in the old 2-D process and simulated into... title: Narnia 3: A Slow Sail with the Yawn Treader image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7f1024a50c863f10/698a4b8b4ee2621fb231cfc2/360_narnia_1208.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # Narnia 3: A Slow Sail with the Yawn Treader by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) Dec 9, 2010 5:00 AM CUT  A scene from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader A scene from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader20th Century Fox / Walden Media by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) Dec 9, 2010 5:00 AM CUT Here’s a little secret: most 3-D movies aren’t in 3-D. I don’t mean that they were shot in the old 2-D process and simulated into stereoptic form in post-production. I mean that some, if not most, scenes in movies like _Alice in Wonderland_ and _Clash of the Titans_ and the forthcoming _TRON: Legacy_ are not _shown_ in 3-D. A good deal of the time while watching the new _Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader_, you can remove your eye-test specs and see the action with perfect clarity — greater clarity, certainly, than if you wore the goggles, since they also severely reduce the brightness of the screen. The movies look better, and you avoid eyestrain. You’re welcome for that little tip. Another way to avoid ocular distress is to skip _Dawn Treader_, the big-screen adaptation of the third book in C.S. Lewis’ seven-volume fantasy series about some English children who escape from their midcentury rural reality into a parallel universe. The film is not objectionable, just perfunctory — a decorous succession of adventure clichés with a cast of performers who should seek treatment for charisma deficiency. _Dawn Treader_, the name of the ship in the story, should here be rechristened _Yawn Treader_. If this movie were a bedtime book, the wee ones would be asleep by page two. [(Video: See TIME’s Holiday Movie Preview.)](https://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,695209050001%5F2035437,00.html "undefined") The first two books, _The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe_ and _Prince Caspian_, became Disney live-action movies in 2005 and 2008\. The two films earned nearly $1.2 billion at the worldwide box office, but extravagant costs prodded Disney to ditch the franchise. Fox assumed distribution, and the budget was cut from $225 million for _Caspian_ to about $150 million for _Dawn Treader_. The studio’s scheme is that profits will come from American evangelicals. Lewis, an indifferent believer in his youth, returned staunchly to the Church of England in his thirties; the Narnia tales are infused with Christian metaphors (he rejected the word allegory), such as the Jesus-like lion Aslan. Fox has been hoping the faith-based community might buttress the usual fantasy-film demographic of kids and idle teens. Hollywood is not a pious town, but Fox executives are praying for a box-office miracle by Sunday. [(See the All-TIME Top 100 Novels.)](https://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1951793%5F1951943%5F1952535,00.html "undefined") In the first films, the four Pevensie children slipped through a closet into Narnia, battled the evil White Witch (Tilda Swinton) and met Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes), whom they helped reclaim the kingdom’s throne from the malefic Miraz. The portal this time is a sea painting, which overflows its frame and carries the two younger Pevensies, Lucy (Georgie Henley) and Edmund (Skandar Keynes), out to the _Dawn Treader_ along with their outstandingly crabby cousin Eustace (Will Poulter). Caspian, having becalmed most of Narnia, is bound to locate seven lords banished during Miraz’s reign. The prince and his talking-mouse friend Reepicheep (good voice job by Simon Pegg) take the children on this tropical cruise to various islands, where they encounter creatures as generic as they are eccentric, and where the balky Eustace is transformed into a dragon — a big improvement in his power, usefulness and disposition. The director, Michael Apted, has just the right c.v. for this job. He’s helmed big-budget adventures (the James Bond film _The World Is Not Enough_) and an English drama about religion (_Amazing Grace_). Most pertinently, for a film about and for kids, Apted is the godfatherly force behind the _Seven Up_ TV documentary series, which began in 1964 as a group portrait of seven-year-old schoolchildren and has revisited them, as they’ve grown up and older, every seven years since. (Next year he should be convening the gang for a _56 Up_.) What he doesn’t impart in _Dawn Treader_ is any dramatic momentum. With each new island visited, the story starts from scratch, expends its energy and moves on. Midway through, the viewer feels like Sisyphus. Good actors would help. Swinton, that wild queen of indie films, lent a sense of regal danger to _Wardrobe_ and _Caspian_, but she’s on screen here for just a few seconds, and neither the handsomely Keanuesque but tepid Barnes nor any of the supporting adult actors can fill her pumps. Henley and Keynes, the picture’s two young stars, are no more prepossessing than they were in the earlier episodes. That’s partly a function of their roles — well-behaved children who haven’t been asked to rise to fury or holiday in comedy — but also of the performers’ vagueness. The newcomer, Poulter, has a bit more fun being horrid, though horrid is all he gets to be for the film’s first hour. Poulter could ripen into a commanding actor; we’ll see, if there are further _Narnia_ films, since Eustace is the hero of two later books. As for the religious messages that are supposed to reap a vast audiences of Christian customers, they’re like the Waldos of Martin Handford’s books: you wouldn’t know they were there unless you were told to find them. Oh, there’s a poem about one island’s creatures, the Dufflepuds, who have been made invisible, “Like the ‘h’ in psychology… the truth in theology.” The holy lion Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson) mixes the gentle wisdom of Jesus with the Old Testament God’s gravitas; but so do Gandalf and Dumbledore from secular literature. And when you hear the line, “We have nothing if not belief,” you are forgiven if you think of _Peter Pan_‘s Tinker Bell, who required the faith of the little ones to restore her to life. For children, the first stories they are read can have the impact of religious experiences. They lift kids out of the material world into a realm where their fictional surrogates, the young heroes, face mortal peril and conquer it; where fallible humans can achieve godlike powers and status; where the authorial gods see that good is rewarded and evil punished. But the telling of these tales demands a fervor, a fever, to propel the narrative and enrapture the listener. In the _Dawn Treader_, that divine urgency is missing. Young people go on a sea trip and stuff happens, in fake 3-D. That’s nothing for audiences, devout or _Narni_agnostic, to believe in. [See the _Narnia_ trailer and other best and worst Super Bowl ads](https://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1707987%5F1707995%5F1708511,00.html "undefined") [See why _Narnia_ hits and _Golden Compass_ flops](https://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1806790,00.html "undefined") Narnia 3: A Slow Sail with the Yawn Treader ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6911266/narnia-3-a-slow-sail-with-the-yawn-treader/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6911266/narnia-3-a-slow-sail-with-the-yawn-treader/"},"headline":"Narnia 3: A Slow Sail with the Yawn Treader","datePublished":"2010-12-09T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-22T16:23:30.599Z","description":"Here's a little secret: most 3-D movies aren't in 3-D. 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