6/10
C.S.Lewis the unfinished story
6 April 2022
Ill start with the film and end with why I feel I was a bit cheated by this production.

C. S. Lewis the atheist finds solace within Christianity a faith of which I admire a lot.

The film depicts his changing thought process based in the Christian ideals and how he applies this to his writing.

I grew up reading all his books many times except one which I read once but I'll come to that later.

As a film and production its a TV movie much in the style of a BBC production so not cheap American plastic but not expertly done either.

Its a thoughtful film about the life and the mind of C. S. Lewis so it meanders along with nice backdrops and if your a fan of the books it creates a nice back drop or back story to the man behind the books.

The acting is so so, the score is average.

The story misses out so much though, the story is written from a purely Christian perspective. Even when they try and present this delicately its still heavy handed.

Basically it tells us how he got to the stage of him writing these classic and brilliant children's stories which are basically biblical in nature.

Its all black and white, he is an atheist and has struggles, he takes on Christianity he reads and learns and writes and produces classic books.

What we don't see is his true dark side or the dark side he is escaping from, his manic depression, his anxiety and many other psychological issues he dealt with.

The biggest flaw for me is the film does not continue through his writing career,from that joyous high of discovery and writing his earlier books to the very dark place he ended up in.

This brings me onto the aforementioned point earlier, by the time C. S. Lewis wrote The Last Battle he had succumbed to the same problems he started with. Along his journey of faith and enlightenment he lost that faith and slowly created worlds that became more brutal, more cynical and less based on faith.

This culminates in The Last Battle, the book I have only read once and never want to go back to. It was a book about his loss of hope his loss of faith and the end of everything.

A true C. S. Lewis film/biography would choose to explore all of this rather than just take the happy enlightenment.

If a Christian based production could pull that off and explain it and give us hope and a way of dealing with that then this would be a triumph.

Instead we are presented with a fairly slow endorphin high that fails to take into account his slow and morose endorphin low.

I still reread all his books every few years but like this film that I won't watch again. I will never reread The Last Battle, Ill leave that as a memory of a 14 yr old and pretend it never happened. If only.....
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