So Aslan says to Hogwarts: I’ll see your Harry Potter and raise you a “Pirates of the Car ibbean.”
The eye-popping and entertaining “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” offers a merry seafaring jaunt together with plenty of adventures led by magically empowered kids.
Director Michael Apted brings back a sense of the old-fashioned fun of the low-tech 1960s myths-and-monsters matinees, when no roiling sea ever failed to harbor a giant serpent — and men stood in the bows of ships facing peril with chins of iron.
The third film in the series finds the two older Pevensie children, Susan and Peter, grown up and moved on to proper adult jobs during WWII. Teens Lucy (Georgie Hensley) and Edmund (Skandar Keynes) are minding their younger cousin Eustace (Will Poulter, an actor who is supposed to be annoying and succeeds perhaps a bit too convincingly). A painting on the wall casts them back into the drink in Narnia, where Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) plucks them out of the sea in his spiffy ship, the Dawn Treader.
There’s a big problem in Narnia these days, which is: There are no problems. Peace reigns, though there are a few details that need to be tidied up involving seven missing lords and an equal number of vanished swords. All of these must be gathered in order to solve the mystery of why some Narnians have vanished in ships that were gobbled up by an evil mist.
After a somewhat perfunctory swashbuckling rescue scene on an island where the principals are nearly sold into slavery, Apted keeps coming up with grander and grander special-effects showcases involving dragons, invisible desperadoes, books of magical incantation, a fairy from a distant star and much else fantasy to jolly things forth.
The story has a tendency to wander into detours, but its moral dilemmas run into deeper, more fraught territory than you’ll find in “Harry Potter.”
Lucy battles her own vanity — a sure way for wickedness to distract her is to turn her mirror image into a vision of the older sister she considers much more beautiful — while Edmund wrestles with greed and envy, growing increasingly angry that Prince Caspian is the boss.
The spirit of Aslan the lion (again voiced by Liam Neeson) pops up like Obi-Wan to remind the children of moral imperatives — as does the White Witch (Tilda Swinton), to coax them into evil.
These soul-ripping aspects are sweetened with plenty of comic interludes, many of them provided by a capering sailor mouse the size of a terrier, Reepicheep (voiced by Simon Pegg), who is forever teaching the obnoxious Eustace a few lessons.
Despite all the visual effects, the film’s best aspects are its attention to real-world values; Hogwarts is a little too inebriated with the spirit of Xbox to bother teaching kids to mind their personal character and do the right thing. “Narnia” also rings with British history and tradition: Not only does the stiff-upper-lip stolidity of WWII Britain give backbone to the children, but there’s a pre-battle exhortation whose roots are in Agincourt. You take Harry Potter 7; I’ll take Henry V.