Prince Caspian Review

I often think of blogging some of my reviews of movies, but I either don't get around to it (for instance - I started this post on May 18, and am finishing it now on the 23rd - a full week after I saw the film), or I figure I don't see enough new releases to make it worth blogging about (who wants a movie review about a film that was released 2-6 years ago?).

So I had the rare opportunity to see Prince Caspian on it's opening day. My summation of my thoughts: I can't recall loving and hating a movie so much at the same time.

I thought Christianity Today had a great review of the film, so I'll point my three readers to that. But if you really are interested in my thoughts, here they are in brief:

• I love New Zealand! It's the perfect setting for these films (and my favorite film of all-time - the Lord of the Rings (and yes - it is one film, not a trilogy!)).
  
• There were compromises in both the first movie (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) and the second (Prince Caspian), but those are to be expected somewhat. While I never met C.S. Lewis, and am not as well read of him as many others (but I still hold him in high respect and long to read more of his works), I would guess that he would have put up with the changes in the first movie and been pleased with it, but he would have been very upset about changes in the second, despite what his son in law says.
  
• I don't think Andrew Adamson really "gets" the Narnia series (Jeffrey Overstreet seems to agree with me).
  
• I thought Ben Barnes was decent as Caspian, but I hated his fake accent. And is it just me, or does he look like the kid brother of Keanu Reeves?
  
• The guy who played Trumpkin was great!
• I've read how some people didn't like how Reepicheep was handled, but I thought they used him effectively to add humor, yet also made him noble.
• Aslan was not in the movie nearly enough. And I was so disappointed that the conversation between Aslan and Lucy was played off as a dream - it completely destroyed the whole element of faith and doing what God wants us to do despite what others think about us or choose to do.
• That reminds me that I felt they weakened MOST of Lewis' theological underpinings to the story.
  
• I was frustrated with the forced "love interest" between Susan and Caspian.
• I was frustrated that they made Peter so ignoble. They decided to make him "frustrated" at being a teenager again rather than the adult king he was in Narnia for so many years, but to show his frustration he gets into fights with other boys (including Caspian once back in Narnia). I'm sorry, but as High King of Narnia, Peter would have understood the importance of character, of being noble and honorable, and he would have had a maturity about him that would have made him stand out from other boys.
• I thought starting with the birth of Miraz's son was a clever idea, but it was such an abrupt change for M and her friends that they were lost from the very beginning (and we had JUST finished reading Prince Caspian - and she was still lost!).
• Some scenes, like when the Pevensie kids and Caspian were all looking at the image of Aslan in Aslan's How, were just too forced (looked like they were trying to make a movie poster rather than tell a story).
• The "added" material not found in the book didn't "add" to the movie in any way in my opinion.
• There was TONS more action in this film, but not much blood (which was probably intentional to get a PG rating - but this movie was PG-12.5 if anything...)
  

So I loved the landscape, the cinematography was good, the acting was good enough, the CGI was great (there were a few spots I felt it was rough - some of the animals' movements, especially the Centaurs, didn't move as smoothly and naturally as they would had they been real), the story was altered too much from the books, and Adamson should have not tried to remake the Lord of the Rings and stuck to the original story more.