Home | Entertainment
'The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian' a royal slog through sterile territory
By Christopher Kelly
McClatchy Newspapers
May 15, 2008
More swordplay. More epic battles. More furry talking creatures. Heck, there's even a brief return visit from the White Witch.
The only thing that's missing from "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian," based on the second novel in C.S. Lewis' famed "Narnia" series and the sequel to 2005's blockbuster "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," is a sense of magic and discovery — that feeling that we've embarked on a journey into another world.
This plodding spectacle, which runs only one minute longer than the original but somehow feels twice as long, turns out to be a strangely generic war movie pitting uninteresting good guys against one-dimensional bad guys. It's a chore to sit through and a bore to contemplate.
One year has passed in the lives of the Pevensie children, the former kings and queens of Narnia, who are now trudging through everyday life in wartime London.
Until, that is, they are unexpectedly summoned back to Narnia, where 1,300 years have passed and the entire place has gone to seed.
Ruled by a group of humans who have driven the Narnians — including Aslan the Lion — into exile, this once peaceable kingdom now faces a veritable constitutional crisis: Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes), the rightful heir to the throne, has narrowly escaped an assassination attempt on his life by his evil Uncle Miraz (Sergio Castellitto), who has ruthlessly taken power.
The bulk of "Prince Caspian" chronicles how Caspian and the Pevensies team up against Miraz, as young Lucy Pevensie (Georgie Henley) tries to convince everyone she's seen glimpses of Aslan in the forest. Of course, the screenplay, by director Andrew Adamson, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, doesn't bother to further develop the other Pevensies, Peter (William Moseley), Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Susan (Anna Popplewell), or even to explain some pretty basic plot points (to wit: Once his people realize he's still alive, why can't Prince Caspian simply reclaim the throne?).
Instead, we're driven headlong into a series of CGI-heavy battles, whose visual design owes a marked debt to Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. (The camera repeatedly hurls through the air, approximating the trajectory of airborne arrows or hurling cannonballs.)
To pander to the tykes in the audience, Adamson (who also directed the original) includes a lot of very broad comedy, courtesy of two wisecracking dwarves played by Peter Dinklage and Warwick Davis, and a rapier-wielding, feather-wearing mouse (voiced by Eddie Izzard) who bears a wee too much resemblance to Puss-in-Boots from the "Shrek" movies (the first two of which Adamson also directed).
All of which is to say that Prince Caspian feels dumbed-down and overly slick, like a movie that's been manufactured in a science lab.
The characters never come alive, partly because some of the acting is plainly terrible (Barnes, a relative newcomer mostly known for his work on the British stage, adopts an accent that makes him sound like he's trying out for the lead of a Spanish telenovela), but mostly because the performers are given nothing unexpected to do (why cast the gifted, Faustian-looking Castellitto as a bad guy, and then ask him to put over cliches that would have seemed moldy in the silent-film era?).
Even the intriguing theological subtext of the original film has been made obvious, a didactic Sunday school lecture about the importance of maintaining faith in your savior, even if he's not physically present or even corporeal.
Lucy putters through the movie pining for Aslan; that may be faithful to Lewis' novel, but it's nearly crippling to this adaptation, forcing us to wait nearly two hours before we can spend time with the creature that remains this franchise's singular wonder. (Liam Neeson once again lends his soothing Irish voice to Aslan.)
And when Aslan does finally appear, Adamson allows the religious imagery to turn oppressive and exclusionary, with a sequence in which our beloved feline not only parts the sea but also generates an enormous water creature with a distinctly Jesus-like countenance.
Take your diversions where you can find them: There's a terrific sequence smack in the middle of the picture, involving a renegade dwarf and the White Witch (Tilda Swinton) encased in elastic-seeming ice crystals; for 10 fleeting minutes, "Prince Caspian" manages to evoke some of the spooky wonder of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."
A couple of the new animal characters, including a no-nonsense badger named Trufflehunter (voiced by Ken Stott), also prove hard to resist.
Mostly, though, this overlong and belabored movie, with its multiple climaxes and repeated epilogues, bears the unmistakable stamp of a franchise that's settling in for the long haul — not to mention the grubby fingerprints of a studio determined not to upset a lucrative cash cow.
The adaptation of "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader," the third book in the Narnia series, is already scheduled for release in May 2010 (it will be directed by Michael Apted, of "Gorillas in the Mist" and "The World Is Not Enough"); and the fourth, "The Silver Chair," is expected to follow a year later.
But until the filmmakers remember that you can't make great art without taking a few creative risks, the "Narnia" franchise is likely to be one of steadily diminishing returns.
'THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN'
c- STARRING: Ben Barnes, Sergio Castellitto, Georgie Henley, Peter Dinklage DIRECTOR: Andrew Adamson WHERE: Bay Area-wide RATING: PG for action violence RUNNING TIME: 2 hours, 24 minutes
Copyright 2008
Powered By Zebra Mobile
