The latest installment of children's lit - turned movie is the weakest. The green-screen use is laughable: for example, when standing on a hilltop, next to an animal whose fur is blowing in the wind, we see a too-close shot of the children, whose improperly-lit hair is standing PERFECTLY still... on a hilltop. The CG backgrounds are not detailed and very plain (hill, trees, no movement).<br /><br />Also, these children could not act, I hate to say it. Emotions, no. Excitement, no. Holding a sword like a human being, no.<br /><br />The pacing was somehow both too slow AND too fast. There were plenty of dead-air moments that failed to create suspense (people in my theater were snoring, getting up a lot, getting restless), and slow-mo of poorly CG'd battle, but the storyline development (or total lack thereof) was skipped over, pushed ahead, and seemed to take a back seat to the action (as is the formula for modern CD-heavy kids movies).<br /><br />The gore in the animal cruelty of sacrificing the Lion in a strangely pagan-esquire midnight ritual (I somehow didn't picture it like that as a kid reading the book) was beyond a PG depiction, (despite the cut away for the stab, and lack of blood anywhere) and gratuitous, smacking of The Passion of the Christ... but I guess that's exactly what they were going for.<br /><br />I guess as long as a movie doesn't show blood, body parts, or swear words, it doesn't go over PG, despite graphic depictions of pagan sacrifice, animal abuse, creepy cyclops and other humanoids, large-scale warfare, stabbings, beatings, and such.<br /><br />I'm no prude, it is a children's book -- but reading topics is less intense than seeing them graphically depicted on a big-screen, enough for maybe a 13?<br /><br />The storyline is so very simple - find wonderland, set off human alarm, Savior sacrifices himself for you and resurrects, win war against evil Christmas-hating witch. 4 steps. 3 hours to tell? It just isn't as complex as LOTR or even the better Harry Potters. That's why the pacing felt so slow.<br /><br />Had the characters been rounded out (one can interpret a book when making it into a movie, but nobody told Disney this) - it might have been better. If Judas, I mean Edmund, had been explored -- why was he so impudent? Did he really have fantasies of being King? Did he learn a lesson, or just go on/off from traitor to Witch-fighter? Any of these could've been explored instead of the dead-air treatment I watched.