7th's Summer Movie Round Up 2008 Part 3: Prince Caspian
Posted by 7th on May 20, 2008

Title: The Chronicles of Narnia - Prince Caspian
Director: Adam Adamson
Starring: Ben Barnes
7th Score: 3.0/5.0

Spoiler Warning: Plot points of the movie AND the books are discussed in great length here. You've been warned.

Has it been two years already? It sure doesn't seem like it. It doesn't seem so long ago that I was at Disney/MGM Studios, walking through their Narnia Experience, which was comprised of a small sound stage mocked up to look like the frozen forests of Narnia and a nameless local actress dressed as the White Witch proclaiming her eviltude from a paper mache hilltop before unveiling an extended trailer for the film. As we were rushed out of the small barely-a-show to an even smaller room with various swords and other props from the film, I began to have my doubts as to whether or not Disney would be able to pull it off.

Those doubts have not been dissuaded by this newest entry in the series.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian picks up a year later from where the previous film left off. But our story begins in Narnia this time, where 1300 years have past. A brutal and apparently Hispanic race known as the Telmarines have conquered the Land of the Lion, and systematically wiped out every magical creature they could find. As the dwarf Thrumpkin later tells the Pevensies, Narnia is a much less civilized place than when we last saw it. Most of the remaining magical creatures hide in the forests, awaiting the return of their beloved Four Kings of Old. Half the animals stopped talking from despair and have devolved back to their former feral state. It's just not a very happy fun time for anybody.

This holds especially true for Prince Caspian. His father, King Caspian IX, who died not long before under mysterious circumstances, leaving his brother Lord Miraz in charge of things. Miraz is a cold, calculating man who has little patience for Caspian, but respects the law as it pertains to the rules of succession. Until, that is, his wife bears a son. That night, Caspian is awakened by his professor, Dr. Cornelius, who urges him to flee to the forest lest he be assassinated by Miraz's men. Before leaving, Cornelius gives Caspian an ancient horn, the Horn of Queen Susan, and warns the young prince to blow the horn at his moment of greatest peril. In the book, that moment comes after several encounters with the Telmarines and Caspian establishes himself with the Narnians. In the movie, this happens roughly 2 minutes after he leaves the castle grounds.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the Pevensie kids are waiting for the train to take them to school. No mention is made of their mother, or the Professor who took them in at the beginning of the first film. We pick up enough bits and pieces here to learn that Peter has grown somewhat arrogant from his years as high king; Susan has developed a bit of snottiness, lying to a boy about her name because of his apparent un-dateability; Edmund (the one who sold them all out to the Witch in the first movie/book for some fucking candy) is the responsible one; and Lucy is more or less the same little dreamer, which beggars logic, since she's supposed to be a mature woman trapped in a child's body, but I'll get to that later.

Moments after Caspian blows Susan's horn (that just sounds wrong), the Pevensies watch as the subway station slowly transforms into a cave along the shores of Narnia. They rush out onto the sands, laughing and frolicking like we know all British teens do, and then stop when they notice that their castle Cair Paravel is in ruins. The kids climb to the top, and find a hidden chamber containing their old weapons and armor, save for Susan's horn. They set out to discover what has happened in their absence, and almost immediately save Thrumpkin from being drowned by a pair of Telmarine guards. Thrumpkin takes them to meet Caspian, who has already befriended the Narnians by this point, and from there the film becomes The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe 2.0.

The Narnia books shouldn't really be compared to the LOTR trilogy for a number of reasons (even though they are,) the greatest of which is the lack of a an overarching storyline. Whereas LOTR is a Saga, one long story that spans over three books, the Narnia books read more like a serial, a fantasy take on the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew. Yes, they all take place in Narnia, and yes, they all have Aslan and (short of The Magician's Nephew and The Silver Chair) at least one Pevensie kid. But everything else from book to book is more or less unrelated. The Magician's Nephew establishes how the White Witch came to Narnia. The Silver Chair sets up Prince Caspian's successor to the throne. But as far as one one cohesive storyline, forget about it. The kids save Narnia from the White Witch, and then return home. They come back a year later, and everything they established is gone and essentially meaningless, so they save Narnia all over again from the Telmarines, and again go home. Lucy, Edmond, and her cousin Eustace go back in The Dawn Treader to help Caspian find the 7 Lost Lords of Narnia, whom Caspian finds, and then the Lords are never mentioned again in the rest of the books. An abandoned prince and princess find each other during the Pevensie's first reign in A Horse and His Boy, but none of it really has any real affect on the overall plot, since all kingdoms of Narnia are then destroyed by the Telmarines after the Pevensies leave at the end of Wardrobe. Caspian's grandson is set up as the next heir in The Silver Chair, but then comes The Last Battle, where the new king loses most of his forces to the followers of Tash, a false God, and Aslan comes, saves everyone who is good, sends everyone who is bad to Hell, and destroys all of Narnia, only to reveal that the REAL Narnia is in the land he comes from, and all of those who died believing in him (including the Pevensie kids who were killed in a bus accident while the plot of The Last Battle was going on) get to live in the REAL Narnia forever, again, making the plot of the previous six books utterly meaningless, since he could have swooped in and done that at ANY time. I suppose you could say it was drawing inspiration from the Bible, but let's not get into semantics. Well, I'll get into them a little bit. In regards to Lucy, she's the only one who can see Alsan through much of the film, which I suppose is an allegorical reference to to the Christian belief that we all "must be as a child to see the kingdom of heaven." But it doesn't fly in the face of her needing to be an adult at the same time. I've known a lot of born again Christians in my time, but none over the age of 18 who prance about with flowers in their hair and humming happily to themselves like they just landed in Ashbury Park.

So in almost every book of the series, some kids get into a predicament. Their own shortcomings prevent them from succeeding. And then at the last moment, when all hope is lost, Aslan appears and saves their ass, then wipes away all trace of the plot that you just read through, making sure that any kids who pick up at some book other than the first in the series will have no problem following the plot. This makes the act of reading this series feel much like watching an anime series like Voltron, where each episode follows the same pattern: a problem arises, the team face adversity, are unable to finish the battle on their own, so they transform into their Ultimate form, win instantly, and then everything goes back to normal just before the closing credits roll. And as much as I hate to admit it, the Narnia films have not broken that mold.

That is not to say that this is a bad film. It's not. It's just more of the same. Sure, the character of Prince Caspian is a welcome addition. Ben Barnes does a fine job of bringing the character to life (all the performances are much improved over the previous film) Reepacheep the sword-swinging mouse knight is also very well done. Eddie Izzard is proving to be quite a wise choice for voice acting. Peter Dinklage is fantastic as Thrumpkin. He's barely recognizable in his get up, but he definitely brings life to the role, especially in his final scene with Aslan, where he has his "Doubting Thomas" moment. And then there's Warwick Davis; Willow playing an evil Willow. I could have done without him, frankly. All I kept thinking every time he spoke was "Man, Willow is pissed."

The performances aren't the problem here. Nor are the effects. The special effects, short of Aslan himself, are greatly improved over the first film. The Centaurs are just astounding. The effect is more realistic here, more natural. The landscapes are less green-screeney in appearance, which mostly seems to have been done by use of more actual sets that DON'T look like sound stages (the crude fortress built over the remains of the Stone Table, the Telmarine castle, and so on) which is a big improvement over the interior of the White Witch's castle in the first film. The battles, for the most part, are more elaborate, particularly the attack on the Telmarine castle (which was not in the book. This entire sequences was added to give the movie more action.) And the climactic scene where one of the evil Telmarines is swallowed by a giant Water Jesus is a very slick sequence. The water fx alone are amazing.

I also don't have a problem with the score. Some of the themes are revisited from the previous film, but overall the score is just as epic and sweeping as in the first film, even if it isn't warranted by what is on screen. So if the acting, FX, action, and music are all fine, why am I only giving the film a 3? Keep reading.

I guess that it all boils down to the same problem as the books: repetition, and a lack of cohesiveness and plot weight. If you've read the books, you know that ultimately, nothing that happens in Caspian really matters, because Aslan destroys everything in book seven. You go into this film and quickly realize that nothing that happened in the first movie matters either, with the exception that the kids know a White Witch resurrection when they see one. Once you get past the introduction of the new characters, the plot falls right in line with the first movie. One failed battle, a betrayal, and then right into a second battle on an open field with thousands of warriors duking it out, with unique battle strategies (check out how the centaurs use the caves beneath the plain) that ultimately only hold off the bad guys long enough for Lucy to wander into the woods and find Aslan, who raises an army of sleeping soldiers (in the first movie it was creatures frozen by the Witch, in this one it's trees. Yes, trees. Not walking tree creatures like Treebeard, but actual Trees. And believe it or not, it's a really cool effect, particularly when one uses its roots to sprint across the battlefield and take out a trebuchet) and marches the Pevensies to victory. And then, Alsan reveals to the Telmarines who they really are, and sends them back home, along with the Pevensies, who appear right back in that same train station they left from right in time to get onboard, thus wiping away (again) the entire plot that you just sat through, THE END!

Now that's not to say that the plot isn't intricate. It is. The film is much darker than the first, and far more violent. You have sword fights, guys being killed with arrows, beheadings, stabbings, a talking mouse stabs a guy in the face, slits another's throat, and so on. This is not your typical kid's film, folks. There's very little blood (I think you get a brief shot of a bloody cut on King Miraz's leg at one point) but the implications are still there, particularly when Peter slices a guy's head clean off and the helmet goes flipping off screen in mid-air.

There's a lot of LOTR style throne room meetings where plans are discussed, and deals are made, but all of the Telmarine lords play the same character as King Miraz, really: an evil Spaniard who will stoop to any level to get what he wants, even if it means betraying his own people. Sergio Castellitto brings a very tangible vileness to Miraz. You really believe he is as despicable as he is portrayed. But then every man surrounding him just plays their part like they're Castellitto's understudy, and it just becomes almost comical in a sort of Hedley Lamar/ Sheriff Taggert kind of way (I am exaggerating a bit here, but it is a thought that crossed my mind. These guys are so evil they even out evil their king!)

And then there's plot holes, or plot omissions, anyway. In a film where nothing really has any actual dramatic weight or reason to it, you can't really have plot HOLES. Reepacheep's ancestry (he is descended from the mice who chewed through the ropes tying Alsan's body to the stone table) is never brought up. When Aslan summons the River God to kill Miraz's betrayer, he never mentions what it was or why it is loyal to him, so it just seems like what I described earlier: a giant Water Jesus comes out of nowhere, swallows the bad guy, and just disappears, in what appears to be visually inspired by the water horsemen from Fellowship of the Ring, and spiritually inspired by the Egyptians dying in the Red Sea during the Exodus. Look at it this way. Imagine how you would have felt had you sat all the way through Star Wars to the very end, and when Luke fires his photon torpedoes, a humongous Star Baby appears and swats the torpedoes into the exhaust port, and Luke just shrugs it off and flies back to Yavin 4.

I didn't hate this film. But even for fans of the original, I don't know how strongly I can recommend it. Short of improved effects, there's really nothing here that you haven't already seen, even down to the basic plot progression. It's a competent film, but it lacks the emotional "oomph" to make it the epic that it so desperately wants to be. Perhaps if the next film was given to someone like Del Toro or Sam Raimi, any one but the director of Shrek, these scripts might have been given real scope. And just imagine what a Narnia script written by, oh I don't know, Lawrence Kasdan would be compared to what we've gotten thus far. If Disney really wants these films to be the kid's equivalent to what LOTR was, or even just as a comparable series to the Harry Potter films, major changes are going to have to be made before Voyage of the Dawn Treader goes into production. Otherwise, based on the box office of this second film (it made 10 million less its opening weekend than the first, and the first film was a winter release) I doubt they'll ever get past the third film. We'll see what happens after Indy 4 comes out.

-=7th=-