Review: A glowing ‘Prince Caspian’
(CNN) — You may find Narnia a more savage place than you remember, the dwarf Trumpkin cautions the Pevensie children — Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy — on their return visit to the magical land they’d visited in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Fair warning. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is, indeed, a darker and more violent episode than Wardrobe, the first film in the series based on the C.S. Lewis novels.
It is a year later — in the Pevensies’ time. In Narnia, centuries have passed. The castle at Cair Paravel lies in ruins. The trees no longer dance, the bears don’t talk, and the Old Narnians hide out in the woods, praying that one day they will recover their land from the godless, tyrannical Telmarines.
Lewis’ book was one of the weaker entries in the series. But the movie is a marked improvement on the novel and an altogether more robust, confident enterprise than director Andrew Adamson’s previous effort.
Even so, it can’t entirely dispel the aura of Tolkien-in-short-trousers that permeates Narnia, along with that quaint English sense of sovereign entitlement: the blithe conviction that paradise could be reclaimed, if only everyone understood the rules of cricket. At any moment you half expect someone to call a break for tea and crumpets.
That’s part of Narnia’s charm, of course, but also a real challenge for filmmakers addressing a very different audience than the readership Lewis had in mind. iReport.com: What did you think of Prince Caspian?
So the film includes two lengthy battle sequences to spice things up. The first is an invention of Adamson and his writing partners, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (You Kill Me), the second a significant elaboration on a mere two pages in the book. They both provide some welcome energy to the film.
