After seeing The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, I remember thinking to myself, "that was a really good kids movie that even the adults can enjoy." After seeing Prince Caspian, I remember thinking, "that was a great movie, period." In fact, Prince Caspian is on my list of top five movies from 2008. So needless to say, my expectations for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader were pretty darn high. Unfortunately, after seeing Dawn Treader, it appears that they may have been too high. This is not a bad film. In fact, there are some sequences that worked quite well (the picture on the wall that takes the kids back to Narnia comes to mind). And when it was all said and done, it was still a mildly entertaining piece of cinema. The problem with Dawn Treader, though, becomes more apparent when you begin to add up the sum of it's parts. Quite frankly, there were some scenes that felt as if they didn't belong. One example is where Edmund and Caspian almost come to blows at the pool of water that turns items (and people if they fall in) to gold. Up until that point, there was no indication of feelings of animosity between them. The scene felt forced, as if the makers of the film deemed it necessary to include some tension between Caspian and Edmund, akin to the tension that existed between Caspian and Peter in the previous film. It's a scene that transitioned poorly, and didn't feel genuine. And there were others as well. Finally, the screenplay wasn't as crisp as it was in the first two films and the editing left something to be desired. All of this leads to a film that's a bit disjointed. Indeed, when it was over, I had the feeling that I'd just seen some good pieces of what could, and should have been a very good film. However, just as a puzzle can never be complete until the pieces are put in the right place, Dawn Treader is a film that feels incomplete. Some of its pieces are just in the wrong place, while others, seem as if they don't belong at all.
