You can cut out the 'zoo' almost in entirety, and condense the college politics to five or ten minutes. It would mostly focus on NICE.
I liked the college politics, and they were essential for establishing the mystery of the setting and foreshadowing NICE, which was intimately connected with the colleges of Edgestow. As for the zoo, we have really good CGI now.
However, CS Lewis was opposed to films of fantasy and SF novels because he wanted readers to use their imagination to visualize the work. While this approach does not work in the case of, say, Arthur C Clarke, whose literary style is not exactly refined, CS Lewis writes prose on a par with George Orwell, but with superior skill at stimulating the imagination.
The only CS Lewis story that I could enjoy a film of would be a heavily adapted version of
The Great Divorce; I would change the beautifully painted bus leading out of Hell to a jetliner, probably a classic like a Boeing 727, or this being England, maybe a Super VC10, a Trident or a Comet 4B, since in the novel the bus ascends through mist and clouds anyway. and jetliners have a more noble appearance than buses, and airline pilots are more interesting characters than bus drivers*, and I would depict as an
homageto Alfred Hitchcock a demonic police force ominously waiting in their patrol cars for the impending nightfall everyone is afraid of.
*The Langoliers, with its beautiful photography of a TWA L1011, and a brilliant performance by David Morse as a bereaved captain deadheading to Boston, who saves the day, inspired me in this respect. I also feel that Left Behind completely rips it off, with the airline pilot played by Nicholas Cage being an obvious copy in this notoriously bad introduction to a notoriously bad filming of the notoriously flawed eschatology of John Nelson Darby. The Omega Code despite low production values I thought was much better as an eschatological film, largely riding on the masterful performance of Michael York as the antichrist.