In spite of this hint of romance, what ensues is basically a war movie, with elaborate battle sequences in a castle courtyard and on a grassy plain, accompanied by thundering hoofbeats, whizzing arrows, clanking swords and Harry Gregson-Williams's rousing score. When these rulers return, they rescue Trumpkin (Peter Dinklage), a small, angry Narnian taken prisoner by Miraz's soldiers, and eventually join Prince Caspian, who exchanges some long, half-smoldering looks with Susan. And hail the popular struggle of the Narnian underground! Since the Telmarines took over and suppressed the old magic, a hardy remnant of Narnians has been hiding amid the pacified trees, sustaining themselves with the legends of King Edmund (Skandar Keynes), Queen Lucy (Georgie Henley), Queen Susan (Anna Popplewell) and High King Peter (William Moseley). His court is a viper's nest of double-dealing and shifting allegiance.Ĭue grumpy dwarves, swashbuckling mice and, apple-cheeked Pevensies. Miraz is a classic royal usurper, who has taken the throne from Caspian's father, the rightful king, and who plans to pass it along to his own newborn son once Caspian is out of the way. "Prince Caspian" is named for its square-jawed, rather bland hero (played by Ben Barnes), but its major source of dramatic energy is the villain, Caspian's uncle Miraz, who is played with malignant grandeur by the great Italian actor Sergio Castellitto. (The film is being released worldwide this spring and summer.)Īnd tales of heroic adventure, however fanciful, are grounded in human problems of power, cruelty and conflict. Its lush glades and rocky escarpments provide a reminder that the supernaturalism of fairy tales originates in the magic of the natural world.
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The scarcity of digital effects in the first part of the movie allows the director, Andrew Adamson, and Karl Walter Lindenlaub, the director of photography, to explore the beauty of the Narnian landscape by more traditional cinematic means. Its violent (though gore-free) combat scenes and high body count may rattle very young viewers, but older children are likely to be drawn into the thick political intrigue. So "Prince Caspian" is quite a bit darker than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," both in look and in mood. Instead of fauns and Turkish delight, there is murder and betrayal, and a grave, martial atmosphere lingers over the story even when the spunky dwarves and chatty rodents return. In a dark castle in a dark forest, men with heavy armor and beard-shadowed faces quarrel and conspire. Lewis was, along with everything else, a scholar of medieval and Renaissance English literature. When the exiled child kings and queens are thrown back into Narnia (thanks to a sudden outbreak of special effects in a London Tube station), they seem no longer to be in a children's fantasy story, but rather in some kind of Jacobean tragedy, a reminder that C.S. The grand hall where Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy were made monarchs of the realm has fallen into ruin, and the friendly woodland creatures with their homey British accents and computer-animated fur seem to have vanished from the scene. But in Narnia itself, to which the four plucky Pevensies return in "Prince Caspian," the second movie in the series, centuries have passed, and everything has changed. In wartime England, where the Pevensie children live when they're not consorting with talking lions and battling witches, a year or so has gone by. Here in the unenchanted world of ordinary moviegoing, it has been about two and a half years since "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the first installment in Walt Disney and Walden Media's mighty "Chronicles of Narnia" franchise. Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian Directed by Andrew Adamson