Spoilers

If you haven't seen Caspian yet and you intend to, don't read this. It'll be short, anyway.



These are more words to ensure that you really actually want to read the plot spoilers that are bound to follow.

As a movie, all on its own, I suppose it was okay. As an adaptation, it's terrible. Vomit would be more appealing to watch on the screen. (Okay, perhaps that's a little extreme, but it is a pretty awful movie.)

I do not much care that plot needs to be changed to accommodate the movie form of a book. This is just the way things are, and books by nature are difficult to turn into movies, especially a book like Prince Caspian with its somewhat retrospective storyline. So I was more or less open-minded to plot changes.

What bothered me most were the character changes. Lord of the Rings was an excellent adaptation precisely because the characters were retained essentially in book form, howbeit with a bit of excessive youth (Legolas) and comic relief (Gimli). This is simply not the case here at all.

One of the great things about being a king or queen in Narnia is simply that when you return to England you're not the same—I think the interplay between Edmund and Peter expressed it well: "I wish people would stop treating us like kids," Peter says. Edmund (surprisingly witty in this movie) replies, "Uh, we are kids." The rightful rejoinder: "We weren't always." So why in the name of all that is holy and pure does Peter manage to act like a complete ass for the whole movie? He certainly is possessed of significantly more maturity in the book, where his letter to Miraz befits a king ("make sure you spell abhominable with the 'h'," he says).

The conflict between Caspian and Peter is foolish. I realize that this is a story that involves essentially children, and that we really haven't had royalty-in-training for 230 or so years (at least here in the States). That's the only way I can understand how two such kingly characters could be reduced to such infantile caricatures in this movie. Their faults in the book were not tactical by any stretch (don't get me started on the ridiculous 40-minute digression to Miraz's castle, one necessitated by the hack job they did to remove the retrospective story from the book), but rather lapses of faith. I suppose in a world where real live faith is steadily becoming an anachronism and military issues dominate the news, this is not terribly surprising.

Unlike The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan is simply neutered in Caspian, becoming the Narnian equivalent of the atom bomb. Whereas the prior movie decentralized the climax of the story—the breaking of the Stone Table, and even the negotiation over Edmund—in this one the lion merely shows up to roar at the right time. His lecture to Lucy in the book is considerably more stern, an upbraiding for failing to follow her convictions (another lesson we might stand to learn well).

And the invention of a relationship between Susan and Caspian? I almost puked in my mouth.


I appreciated a few things in the movie. A very few. Edmund, I thought, was actually reasonably well done. His character developed (as opposed to the devolution for Peter, and partially Susan—though in her case it is slightly more justified) from the first to the second movie—and this is important in The Dawn Treader, also ("You were just an ass, but I was a traitor"). He was a bit smart for me, I suppose, but also I think probably the most adult. Nonetheless, I have a hard time seeing any king addressing another in the way Edmund did Miraz (especially bearing such a well-written challenge).

Lucy was well played for the most part.

Um, the music was nice. And the scenes were beautiful. And, at least in the beginning, there is a wonderful sense of Home in their return to Narnia. Which is as it should be.


At the end of the day, though, watching Prince Caspian still feels like eating spam instead of steak. Go read the book—you'll find it vastly more entertaining.