Prince Caspian (The Chronicles of Narnia)

Sometime after the release of Braveheart, movies took a horrible visual turn.  Since then, during any action or fantasy movie that features large armies, you get the standard stuff.  The good guy army faces the army of darkness at around the 110-minute mark, and for the next 30 minutes there’s an incredible amount of grunting and sword clashes.  All of the main characters are featured in the battle, one of which will probably die bravely, saving someone else’s life.  Usually there’s a group of archers who fire arrows high into the sky, which the camera tracks for us.  There may be slow motion at a key point.  These battle scenes are, when you think hard about the depth of them, extraordinarily boring.  There is rarely nothing meaningful at stake for the individual characters, and since neither the good guy army or the army of darkness is nuanced, it is a fairly bland ending once the obvious outcome is decided.

Prince Caspian celebrates this blandness.   It has nothing great to offer except an attempted 150-minute emotional high, driven by the musical score featuring blaring french horns.  It’s as if John Williams went berserk and decided to write a rousing theme for every second of this movie.  After awhile, you get worn out listening to and watching this.  Life isn’t this tensely pitched.  Usually when it is, it’s really annoying, like when you’re driving through rush hour traffic.

There are stretches of this movie that are reasonable, especially those that are quieter and that feature lines that were obviously C.S. Lewis’s.  This could’ve easily been a more contemplative, dialogue-driven movie, which would’ve allowed the movie to  attempt to approach the profundity of the book it was based on.  But that wasn’t to be.  Because the movie features cardboard cutouts for characters, the final battle (and the battle before that) offers us little reason to care about who wins.  Sure, Peter might learn a lesson in humility.  Except for hair color and accent, he is indistinguishable — personality-wise — from Edmund or Prince Caspian.

And where is Aslan?  The Disney DVD intro claimed that Disney movies were “magical.”  Certainly Aslan provides the magic here.  He makes one brief appearance early on, and then arrives right on time during the final battle.  He’s a deux ex machina, coming from nowhere to make a big “ta da!” and save the good guys.  In this movie he is entirely superfluous to the plot, which is more worried about how to get to the next battle scene than anything else.

After we were watching, a comment was made that this movie was less intense, and thus more watchable, than the Lord of the Rings series.  That’s like saying that the roller coaster with five vertical loops is much more pleasant than the one with twenty.  Mostly, we’d prefer to not ride the roller coaster at all.  But if were going to compare these two series, Lord of the Rings is far more preferable insofar as it is a much better spectacle.   Prince Caspian is for those who need a Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings fix, but can’t get it because they aren’t making any more of those stories.  Lewis’ works deserve better treatment.  We are waiting on the Christian Orson Welles to give the Narnia series another try.   Heck, we will settle for the Christian Michael Curtiz.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 2

Morality: 7