by larry gilman » October 10th, 2009, 5:00 pm
Yeah, just on the science-teaching ground alone it's so bizarre and hopeless. "Surprising similarity between our world and that of Narnia" my foot!
Look at the kid in the photo. He's cute, he's smiling for the camera, it's great, but in what bizarro universe can we conjecture that he is going to pause thoughtfully over the very fine print posted to the side and pick up some sound scientific knowledge about "frozen frogs"? Can it even be believed that he has been, as the promotional gush promises, "transported into another world to experience Narnia like never before"? I notice that the Witch's palace has acquired a pretty dingy carpet during the transport process . . . By the way, do I mistake, or is there no mention of any icy "throne" on which the Witch sits in the actual Narnia books? And so the movie-makers and their imagineering staff supplant the real thing with their hokey cliché constructions . . .
Basically I read this as a self-promotional gig for Walden Films, Disney, and of course CS Lewis Pte., the company that owns the Lewis rights. The science museum, meanwhile, ups its visitor count (proving its institutional viability and importance) and turns a much-needed buck on the tickets. Perhaps the museum people delusionally imagine that some of the visitors will emerge holding some scrap of science literacy they didn't have on the way in. But you can't trick or entertain people into understanding a way of thinking, and science is a way of thinking or it is nothing but a low-value grab-bag of disconnected factoids. Frozen frogs indeed.
"Too bad. Too bad! Oh, too bad!" -- as Lee said after Gettysburg . . .
L