The latest Empire cover story on Greta Gerwig’s Netflix Narnia adaptation confirms what the casting announcements already suggested: this is not an attempt to translate CS Lewis for a new generation. It is a deliberate re-imagining by a director whose artistic formation appears frozen somewhere in the mid-1970s.
The film, titled Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, shifts the action to the 1950s and gives Aslan a David Bowie-inspired design: heterochromic eyes and a bold red-striped visage. Aslan will be voiced by Meryl Streep. Gerwig describes the choice as seeking “gravitas but not morose self-seriousness” and “wisdom of experience” from an actor “older than 70.” What she has actually done is cast a woman to voice the Christ-figure of Lewis’s world, a male lion whose voice in the books carries the weight of divine authority. The result is not layered or subversive in any interesting sense. It is simply incoherent.
Christians who grew up with these stories have every reason to be furious. Lewis wrote Narnia as explicitly Christian myth, with Aslan as the incarnate Son. Handing that role to Streep while the director chases Bowie references is not neutral artistic license. It is the substitution of one set of formative influences for another. Gerwig, born in 1983, has spoken repeatedly about the music and films that shaped her adolescence. The Bowie nod is not a clever Easter egg. It is the project announcing its real loyalties.
Her selection to direct was itself a provocation. Gerwig’s most commercially successful film, Barbie, succeeded despite a structural failure: roughly fifteen minutes of unearned resolution tacked onto the end after the story had already reached its natural conclusion. The movie works as a satirical set-piece and collapses the moment it tries to say something affirmative about its characters’ futures. That is not the mark of a director equipped to handle Lewis’s moral and theological architecture. It is the mark of a filmmaker Netflix and the producers clearly chose to signal that the original vision was no longer operative.
The 1950s setting compounds the problem. Lewis placed the stories across multiple eras precisely because the world of Narnia was meant to feel both ancient and immediate. Relocating the origin story to postwar Britain does not deepen the material. It flattens it into period costume while the theological center is voiced by an actress whose presence reads as a running commentary on the source rather than an embodiment of it.
None of this is accidental. The Empire piece presents these choices as bold and personal. They read instead as a middle finger delivered with expensive production values. Fans who wanted a faithful adaptation were never going to get one once Gerwig was attached. The only remaining question is whether the finished film will even attempt to justify its own revisions or simply expect the audience to applaud the director’s reference points. Given the evidence so far, the latter seems far more likely.
