Prince Caspian, One Sentence Review: Not a bad movie, but several times I had to wonder where the story line came from.
A few more thoughts:
Reminded me greatly of The Lord of the Rings movie: take the names, places, and surface plot of a popular book, then make up your own story to hold it all together.
Great animation and special effects, measured mostly by the fact that I hardly noticed them. Walking and talking badgers and mice seem perfectly normal, and even the centaurs are convincing. Reepicheep is wonderful; they did a great job with the mice, not just the animation but also the dialogue and action.
The actress who plays Lucy does an excellent job, and the actor playing Edmund is pretty good, too.
One thing that had bothered me about the first Narnia movie was what appeared to be a deliberate flouting of Lewis's determination that the girls not be fighters if at all possible ("battles are ugly when women fight"). After having read an interview with the director of the movies, it concerns me less, as I see his point that Lewis's view towards women changed through time, no doubt at least in part due to getting to know Joy Davidman, the strong, intelligent woman whom he eventually married. I'm not sure that even were he still alive today Lewis's views would have evolved to the point where he would have been happy with women fighting on the battlefield, but I doubt he would have objected to strong, wise, competent female characters. Indeed, girls are often depicted just that way in the books, but the movie is so focused on the battles that there is hardly time for any character, male or female, to show strength and courage in any other way.
Battle fatigue. Enough with the fighting, already! Reminded me of a Presbyterian sermon: first third, interesting and valuable; second third, unnecessary rehash; final third, soporific. Much too much violence for its PG rating, in my opinion.
If they'd devoted less screen time to killing, they might might have had room for some of my favorite scenes from the book, like the Romp with Bacchus when Aslan awakened the trees, the Feast after the battle, and what Aslan and the girls did in Beruna.
My two favorite scenes from the movie, though neither is in the book: the cat in the castle, and Lucy drawing her dagger on the bridge with Aslan.
If the main characters are disconcerted by the time shifting between the two worlds, I am equally so by the incongruities in the movie. I could understand a re-setting of the story so that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy were modern children, but in that case, why keep the World War II setting? In the book, the characters' speech, actions, and attitudes reflect either the mid-twentieth-century world, or the quasi-Medieval world of Narnia; in the movie, the setting is WWII London or Narnia, but the culture 21st century Hollywood. Including some romantic scenes that are totally unnecessary and definitely not in the book.
Was Prince Caspian worth seeing? For us, yes, since our tickets were only $5 each, we already know the books well, and I want to be able to converse about it. Would I see it again? I doubt it, and therein is a great difference from the book, which I have probably read more than two dozen times in the last 45 years. If the movie encourages people to read the Narnia books who otherwise wouldn't, then, yes, it's well worth seeing. But don't watch the movie and think you know much at all of the story as C. S. Lewis wrote it. Perhaps it is possible for a movie to convey the delights of a book like Prince Caspian, but it doesn't seem to happen very often.
Yes, much in agreement. Just finished reading a well written review and conversation by Jeffrey Overstreet. Check it out, along with his Litany of Reviews.
Thanks, Tom. It's good to know Overstreet saw the same movie I did. :)
Another blog writer whose posts I often enjoy is John C. Wright, and in the spirit of fairness I'll link to his review of Prince Caspian. He loved the movie, so don't just take my word for its worth, even though when he says, "it captures the soul of the book," I have to wonder if he and I read the same book. It just shows that a great book can mean very different things to different people.
My favorite part of his post, however, is one of the comments that follows: Different Take by "ibookworm." He articulates well one of my greatest complaints about movies made from books, particularly this one and The Lord of the Rings. I encourage you to read ibookworm's entire analysis of what Prince Caspian, the movie, did to the character of Peter. The heart of a story is its characters. It is through the characters that the audience experiences the world of the story. Therefore one must be very careful, when adapting great works of literature to the screen, not to change the characters, or one changes the story.
We just started into this series, and I noted that the "inspiration" for the battle scenes in the first movie were drawn from a half-paragraph in the book.
We are now reading Prince Caspian, and since we are starting into the second chapter of a battle, it makes sense that the movie is almost entirely battle scenes... urm...
I think one problem is how to give a movie battle equally short shrift as you can give it in a book. It just wouldn't work.
I've just re-(re-re-re-re-...)read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and am curious as to how they will render it in movie form, since it has not one battle. :)
I realized, as I was waking up this morning, that one thing that has bothered me about the renditions of both The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Ringsis that they illustrate so well how much easier it is to create believable villains than believable heroes. The White Witch comes across quite well as beautiful, terrible, and very impressive. Miraz is credible, understandable, and also impressive. Aslan, however, comes across as a tame lion rather than the wise, intelligent, fearsome, powerful being who inspires both great terror and greater love -- which the book expresses exceptionally well. Peter and Caspian come off as petulant, squabbling adolescents rather than as a knight and a king, on the one hand, and as one on his way to becoming both, on the other. Meaning, of course, the chivalric ideal of knight and king, not the way they so often worked out in this world. Perhaps the movie-makers were intending to be more realistic, from a 21st century point of view, but doing so strips the book of its greatest power.
The boat storm and the dragon scenes should be able to take up an hour or so, and we are only halfway through the book.
Good point. A storm, like a battle, is something that can be expressed in a few paragraphs yet requires a disproportionate amount of screen time.
