If you’ve read Prince Caspian, the second book in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia fantasy series, then you may be wondering how it would be possible to turn the dull, tedious story into a rousing, exciting action movie. For the answer, turn to Andrew Adamson’s film version, which, though it suffers from many of the same flaws as his 2005 adaptation of the first Narnia novel, expands and contracts the story in just the right places to transform it into successful summer-blockbuster fodder.
To start with, Adamson once again expands on Lewis’ fairy-tale aesthetic to offer some identifiable characterization, showing the four Pevensie children back in WWII-era London a year after their first adventure in Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. One of the odd things about Lion was the way it elided years of time at its end, as the Pevensie siblings became the rulers of Narnia and grew to adulthood, only to pop right back out of the enchanted wardrobe as children again. That’s a seriously traumatic experience to contemplate, and Adamson and his two co-writers at least acknowledge its complexity as the quartet have difficulty adjusting back to civilian life.
Even once they’re magically whisked back to Narnia—more than a thousand years after their initial visit while only a single year has passed in England—the Pevensies carry over a bit of their newfound angst. That slight darkness bleeds into the film as a whole, which is more intense and morally ambiguous than Lion was. Both of those qualities are improvements over Lewis’ book, which favored labored, drawn-out religious allegory over heated battles (most of which the author dispatched in a few sentences).
The reason that Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) find themselves back in Narnia is that the titular prince (Ben Barnes) has blown a mystical horn that calls on ancient kings and queens, whose aid he needs to defeat his evil uncle Miraz (Sergio Castellitto). Miraz and his people have nearly extinguished the Narnians of old, fantastical creatures like dwarves, fauns and talking animals, and the ones who remain live in fear. Caspian sets himself up as their liberator, and the Pevensies show up to lend their expertise.
Really, though, it doesn’t much matter how good either Caspian or Peter is on the battlefield, since, as in the first movie, Christ-surrogate lion Aslan will show up at the crucial moment and save the day himself. Adamson does well to downplay Aslan’s role quite a bit here, and the message about trusting in faith even without any physical evidence is handled with gentle nudges rather than Lewis’ bludgeon. Cutting down on the exposition and the theology makes more time for epic battles, which are about as exciting as they were the last time around (just good enough, but not quite spectacular). Adamson can’t resist going for the grandeur, though, and the movie sags at more than two hours. A lengthy castle-invasion sequence, invented wholly for the movie, could have easily been cut in half.
Miraz is also not nearly as compelling a villain as was Lion’s White Witch (Tilda Swinton, who makes a brief cameo), even if his role is greatly expanded from the book. And Caspian, set to take center stage in the series’ next installment, is too much of a bland hero to care about as much as we do the Pevensies, with their conflict between two different worlds. Still, Prince Caspian works better than it should given its source material, and the awkward moments are pretty well balanced out by the exciting ones. It’s a shame that this is the last chapter to feature the older Pevensies (and the penultimate to feature any of them at all), since it seems like their story is just starting to show its potential.
The Chronicles of
Narnia: Prince Caspian
***
William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, Ben Barnes
Directed by Andrew Adamson
Rated PG
Opens Friday, May 16