The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is not a particularly bad movie, nor is it a particularly good movie. It is, however, a bad sequel--equally as much as the actual book was a poor follow up to the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, but despite all the mean things I am about to say about it, if you were a fan of the first movie, there's absolutely no harm in watching this one. That said, as Yahtzee would say, let's talk shittyness.
Prince Caspian takes place a year after the events in the first movie and once again features the four Pevensie children, who are still trying to cope with being 30-something adults (and royalty, no less) trapped in the bodies of ugly British children, and in the opening sequences we are introduced to their new inner conflicts that will become plot devices throughout the film, and all of the characters feature them, excepting Lucy who is so obnoxiously perfect you just want to break her stupid horse teeth, and partially excepting Edmund.
We're also introduced to the eponymous Prince Caspian, who everyone seems to want to kill, and he's helped by some fat guy who looks like a short version of Dumbledore from the Harry Potter movies. More on him in a second.
It's not long before the Pevensies are uncerimoniously whisked back to Narnia in a rather clumsy, but visually appealing CG sequence, and promptly take the moment to splash around in the water and wander about a ruined castle, mindlessly chattering about why everything looks so different. For, indeed, everything IS different--while it's been just a year for them in dreary, pre-Cold War England, in Narnia it's been 1300 years, and the shit has hit the fan.
An army of Moorish Conquistadores from some foreign land took over Narnia and have been doing a rather efficient job of slaughtering all of our beloved woodland creatures, dwarves, centaurs and the like. The main villain is King Miraz--the uncle of Prince Caspian, and a general conniving little prick all around. The first half of the movie is basically Prince Caspian trying to unite the rebellious Narnians and Peter and company trying to find Prince Caspian. Once the two groups meet up, there's plenty of clashing of egos, infiltrating castles, and swasbuckling mice for the whole family.
Where the first movie and book mostly kept the characters very static--besides Edmund being a perfect little shit, the only real inner conflict the characters deal with is normal, childish bickering. The bickering returns in this, besides the fact that we are uncomfortably reminded quite often that, technically, the Pevensies are all MUCH older than the look, and in fact should be a lot more adult than they actually act.
Peter basically strolls through the movie like a huge, swinging cock, yelling at just about everything and having no particular desire to do anything more than thrust his phallic magical sword into the gut of some poor Kurdish bastard, whereas Susan begins the movie as being a slightly psychotic, anti-social *****, showing a complete lack of understanding of social niceities, and really only being too enthusiastic about shooting things with her bow--which she does, all the time, whenever she fucking can. It's nice that they actually give her a chance to use her bow, as in the last movie/book she does jack shit with it. I mean, they make a whole scene about her getting it and she almost NEVER uses the blasted thing. Even obnoxious little Lucy is more useful than Susan, so now, to compensate, she shoots just about everybody she can. She's sort of like a middle ages Charleton Heston, but with tits.
Lucy is, of course, the moral and spiritual heart of the group, having little difficulty in hopping around the magical land looking for Aslan (who shall be called Jesus for the rest of the review, as C.S. Lewis really intended) while weeping over dead bears and trying to talk to trees. She's really like the "littlest nun", because she is constantly berating all the other characters for their lack of faith, and then getting quite self-important when they realize she's right. Edmund, rounding out the group, is actually the most likeable of them all. He's level-headed, rational, and seems to make a good balance of smart thinking and proper amounts of mystical divine reverence. However, the whole family pretty much looks really, really awkward when compared to Prince Caspian.
Caspian rides about the country side with his perfectly feathered hair looking like some barely-legal Puerto Rican pool boy a desperate housewife would hire to fuck her brains out, and seeing him next to the pasty, whiny British children you find it extremely hard to really take anything they do seriously. I mean, HERE is a king, here is a heroic looking character. He swashes. He buckles. He swashbuckles, and he's easy to like and easy to follow, but the problem is is that we don't really get any reason to buy into his character besides mere looks. I mean, he's got all the right motivations, but we don't have a lot of depth for him, and that's really the main problem with the story on a whole.
See, the book Prince Caspian is actually extremely boring. Really, compared to the magic of Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, or the Gulliver's Travels-esque Voyage of the Dawn Treader (easily Lewis' best Narnia book), Prince Caspian seems woefully inadequate, especially since the majority of the book is a flashback about Prince Caspian's life, making sure that he's the star of the story even if he doesn't really DO anything. We understand his character, we see things from a Telmarine perspective, and as such it both humanizes and further villifies the villains, making Caspian all the more important because he's bridging the gap between human and magical creature kind. He and his tutor are the stars of the show, and while the book is bland and passive, it does deliver what it's title promises, which is Prince Caspian.
Here, on the other hand, we have both Caspian and Peter competing for the limelight. Peter wants to go around fucking everything he can while Caspian really only cares about avenging his dead father, uniting his kingdom, and trying not to die. Caspian actually has to deal with the heaviest shit in the story, and so it's a little awkward when Peter is charging around like an idiotic because he's a self-proclaimed hero of the realm because, frankly, he's really just a dick.
Of course, it gives plenty of time for Peter to have an agonizing evaluation of his faith, and that's where Jesus comes into play, with all of his feline glory. See, Peter believes he doesn't need Jesus, and Lucy says they need to love Jesus a whole huggy bunch, and Edmund is more like "Well, Lucy is actually always right, so why don't we just listen to her?" and then everyone pauses for a second like he's said something profound before Peter boldly swings his throbbing steel shaft at some other hapless bad guy. The religious symbolism in this film is about as subtle as a mallet to the head, and I found it almost a little jarring, because it stirs up all that unfortunate Catholic guilt that eats away at my ability to have a selfish good time.
In the first movie, the religious aspect was, in my opinion, downplayed some. It was readily there for those who wanted it, but because Aslan is actually given a solid, physical role in the film's narrative, he isn't as solidly a Jesus-exemplar as he is in this movie. In the context of film, Jesus vanished after Peter and siblings did, and he hasn't done shit in about 1300 years for no readily explanable reason. Peter gets all pissy about this and decides he doesn't need Aslan, and most of Narnia is ready to agree with him because they want results, and blind faith hasn't really been delivering. Then, of course, when Peter's propensity for penetrating sweaty men in chain link armor leads to dismal failure, they immediately turn to Satan worship.
Hooray for religious allegories!
The whole topic of religion in the movie is a little muddied, because the moral of the tale isn't particularly clear. Yes, by the end Jesus shows up and kills all the bad guys, but what lesson do we learn? Blind faith didn't really help anybody, but neither did being a huge swinging dick and trying to smear your balls into peoples' faces, so ultimately neither side is vindicated and the ultimate message seems to be that God will do whatever the fuck he wants to because he fucking CAN.
And doing whatever you want to do is sort of the slogan of the movie itself, because it does whatever it wants to. Instead of boring us with a ten chapter flashback sequence, Prince Caspian the film keeps everything in the present, referring to past events through dialogue, and it works well enough to keep the story interesting, even if you do get genuinely sick of all the whining. On the upside, to counter the abysmal weight that the shoddy main characters wield we get some absolutely phenomenal supporting cast mates.
Trumpkin the dwarf is played absolutely brilliant by a pissy little midget guy who is the funniest guy in the cast, and he's actually genuinely interesting. He's world weary and sarcastic, offering a glib counterbalance to the peachy-perfection of the Pevensies and when he's not talking he's glaring gloomily at everyone, making it possible to laugh at his every action without him saying a god damn word. Repeecheep as well is a swashbuckling mouse, and that's really all you need. Eddie Izzard plays him up in his typical rambling fashion, and he's pretty much brilliant in every scene he's in, save for the very end where he and Jesus have a conversation almost verbatim from the book and it showcases how, once again, C.S. Lewis knows shit about writing compelling dialogue.
The movie, however, suffers from the fact that it is a sequel. The set pieces begin to repeat themselves a fair bit this time around--within twenty minutes you are handed just about everything that the first movie spend an entire hour building up to, and once you have that, it's really just...bland. Oh look, centaurs! Oh look, minotaurs! Oh look, bloody fucking fauns! Oh, is that a dwarf? How precious! There's really nothing NEW in Narnia--unlike all the other books, Prince Caspian doesn't really play into its fantastical side at all, so we're really watching a story being staged in the exact same way the last film was, except that the budget is bigger. Even the music is the same--Harry Gregson Williams, of Metal Gear Solid fame, is a brilliant composer and the soundtrack for the first movie was the best part, but he got really fucking lazy for this one because he basically just reuses the same three tracks from the first movie over and over again, leaving the feeling of this whole thing being really stale all the more poignant.
Of course, with a bigger budget comes bigger...everything. There are two major battles in this movie, and each one is an agonizingly drawn out affair. The Lord of the Rings rip-offs are heavy in the air, especially at the end of the final battle, but there's a very obvious attempt to make this movie more "epic" than its predecessor, but in the process of doing so, it sort of rings false. In Lion, the witch and the Wardrobe, the book itself is relatively spartan, so sprucing up the tale is a perfectly good thing--it adds more content for the movie viewer and allows the terribly dull climax of the book to be spiced up with an epic battle sequence. In Prince Caspian, however, there really isn't any SPACE for a big battle sequence. The conflict is concluded with an epic sword duel between Peter and Miraz (because, in the book, Peter is infallible and so does everything important himself, reducing Caspian to pretty window dressing) and the war is done and over.
In this movie, thanks to the subplot of political strife and turmoil going on inside the Telmarine government, the duel happens, but it just leads into another huge battle sequence that just seems to be a rehash of the first movie's fighting. There's some cleverness, but at the same time, in this movie, the bad guys are all humans. Considering that Peter and Susan are killing people about every five scenes, this starts to get a fair bit disturbing, especially since this is a children's story. In the first film, the bad guys were all big monstrous bulls, and that was fucking sweet, because we got to see a sort of battle we don't see too often, with cleverness and originality.
This time, we get centaurs fighting conquistadores. Woo.
So, in conclusion, what can I say? If you weren't totally thrilled by the first movie, skip this one. It doesn't offer the excitment or the originality of Speed Racer, and if you want to please your little kids, Speed Racer is definitely the better choice. It's more of the same--it takes very few risks and it offers very few innovations, and while the conflict between Peter and Caspian is actually engaging and genuinely interesting, and Edmund is actually a great character who gives the movie some level-headed grace, the movie seems overly full of itself, begging you to be blown away by how epic it is, or expecting your souls to be changed by how Jesus can save everybody right when it's most convienient for him, but it ultimately can't really deliver either of those two goals, and so it's really just a worse version of the first film.
Rent it, at best.
Go see Speed Racer.
Prince Caspian takes place a year after the events in the first movie and once again features the four Pevensie children, who are still trying to cope with being 30-something adults (and royalty, no less) trapped in the bodies of ugly British children, and in the opening sequences we are introduced to their new inner conflicts that will become plot devices throughout the film, and all of the characters feature them, excepting Lucy who is so obnoxiously perfect you just want to break her stupid horse teeth, and partially excepting Edmund.
We're also introduced to the eponymous Prince Caspian, who everyone seems to want to kill, and he's helped by some fat guy who looks like a short version of Dumbledore from the Harry Potter movies. More on him in a second.
It's not long before the Pevensies are uncerimoniously whisked back to Narnia in a rather clumsy, but visually appealing CG sequence, and promptly take the moment to splash around in the water and wander about a ruined castle, mindlessly chattering about why everything looks so different. For, indeed, everything IS different--while it's been just a year for them in dreary, pre-Cold War England, in Narnia it's been 1300 years, and the shit has hit the fan.
An army of Moorish Conquistadores from some foreign land took over Narnia and have been doing a rather efficient job of slaughtering all of our beloved woodland creatures, dwarves, centaurs and the like. The main villain is King Miraz--the uncle of Prince Caspian, and a general conniving little prick all around. The first half of the movie is basically Prince Caspian trying to unite the rebellious Narnians and Peter and company trying to find Prince Caspian. Once the two groups meet up, there's plenty of clashing of egos, infiltrating castles, and swasbuckling mice for the whole family.
Where the first movie and book mostly kept the characters very static--besides Edmund being a perfect little shit, the only real inner conflict the characters deal with is normal, childish bickering. The bickering returns in this, besides the fact that we are uncomfortably reminded quite often that, technically, the Pevensies are all MUCH older than the look, and in fact should be a lot more adult than they actually act.
Peter basically strolls through the movie like a huge, swinging cock, yelling at just about everything and having no particular desire to do anything more than thrust his phallic magical sword into the gut of some poor Kurdish bastard, whereas Susan begins the movie as being a slightly psychotic, anti-social *****, showing a complete lack of understanding of social niceities, and really only being too enthusiastic about shooting things with her bow--which she does, all the time, whenever she fucking can. It's nice that they actually give her a chance to use her bow, as in the last movie/book she does jack shit with it. I mean, they make a whole scene about her getting it and she almost NEVER uses the blasted thing. Even obnoxious little Lucy is more useful than Susan, so now, to compensate, she shoots just about everybody she can. She's sort of like a middle ages Charleton Heston, but with tits.
Lucy is, of course, the moral and spiritual heart of the group, having little difficulty in hopping around the magical land looking for Aslan (who shall be called Jesus for the rest of the review, as C.S. Lewis really intended) while weeping over dead bears and trying to talk to trees. She's really like the "littlest nun", because she is constantly berating all the other characters for their lack of faith, and then getting quite self-important when they realize she's right. Edmund, rounding out the group, is actually the most likeable of them all. He's level-headed, rational, and seems to make a good balance of smart thinking and proper amounts of mystical divine reverence. However, the whole family pretty much looks really, really awkward when compared to Prince Caspian.
Caspian rides about the country side with his perfectly feathered hair looking like some barely-legal Puerto Rican pool boy a desperate housewife would hire to fuck her brains out, and seeing him next to the pasty, whiny British children you find it extremely hard to really take anything they do seriously. I mean, HERE is a king, here is a heroic looking character. He swashes. He buckles. He swashbuckles, and he's easy to like and easy to follow, but the problem is is that we don't really get any reason to buy into his character besides mere looks. I mean, he's got all the right motivations, but we don't have a lot of depth for him, and that's really the main problem with the story on a whole.
See, the book Prince Caspian is actually extremely boring. Really, compared to the magic of Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, or the Gulliver's Travels-esque Voyage of the Dawn Treader (easily Lewis' best Narnia book), Prince Caspian seems woefully inadequate, especially since the majority of the book is a flashback about Prince Caspian's life, making sure that he's the star of the story even if he doesn't really DO anything. We understand his character, we see things from a Telmarine perspective, and as such it both humanizes and further villifies the villains, making Caspian all the more important because he's bridging the gap between human and magical creature kind. He and his tutor are the stars of the show, and while the book is bland and passive, it does deliver what it's title promises, which is Prince Caspian.
Here, on the other hand, we have both Caspian and Peter competing for the limelight. Peter wants to go around fucking everything he can while Caspian really only cares about avenging his dead father, uniting his kingdom, and trying not to die. Caspian actually has to deal with the heaviest shit in the story, and so it's a little awkward when Peter is charging around like an idiotic because he's a self-proclaimed hero of the realm because, frankly, he's really just a dick.
Of course, it gives plenty of time for Peter to have an agonizing evaluation of his faith, and that's where Jesus comes into play, with all of his feline glory. See, Peter believes he doesn't need Jesus, and Lucy says they need to love Jesus a whole huggy bunch, and Edmund is more like "Well, Lucy is actually always right, so why don't we just listen to her?" and then everyone pauses for a second like he's said something profound before Peter boldly swings his throbbing steel shaft at some other hapless bad guy. The religious symbolism in this film is about as subtle as a mallet to the head, and I found it almost a little jarring, because it stirs up all that unfortunate Catholic guilt that eats away at my ability to have a selfish good time.
In the first movie, the religious aspect was, in my opinion, downplayed some. It was readily there for those who wanted it, but because Aslan is actually given a solid, physical role in the film's narrative, he isn't as solidly a Jesus-exemplar as he is in this movie. In the context of film, Jesus vanished after Peter and siblings did, and he hasn't done shit in about 1300 years for no readily explanable reason. Peter gets all pissy about this and decides he doesn't need Aslan, and most of Narnia is ready to agree with him because they want results, and blind faith hasn't really been delivering. Then, of course, when Peter's propensity for penetrating sweaty men in chain link armor leads to dismal failure, they immediately turn to Satan worship.
Hooray for religious allegories!
The whole topic of religion in the movie is a little muddied, because the moral of the tale isn't particularly clear. Yes, by the end Jesus shows up and kills all the bad guys, but what lesson do we learn? Blind faith didn't really help anybody, but neither did being a huge swinging dick and trying to smear your balls into peoples' faces, so ultimately neither side is vindicated and the ultimate message seems to be that God will do whatever the fuck he wants to because he fucking CAN.
And doing whatever you want to do is sort of the slogan of the movie itself, because it does whatever it wants to. Instead of boring us with a ten chapter flashback sequence, Prince Caspian the film keeps everything in the present, referring to past events through dialogue, and it works well enough to keep the story interesting, even if you do get genuinely sick of all the whining. On the upside, to counter the abysmal weight that the shoddy main characters wield we get some absolutely phenomenal supporting cast mates.
Trumpkin the dwarf is played absolutely brilliant by a pissy little midget guy who is the funniest guy in the cast, and he's actually genuinely interesting. He's world weary and sarcastic, offering a glib counterbalance to the peachy-perfection of the Pevensies and when he's not talking he's glaring gloomily at everyone, making it possible to laugh at his every action without him saying a god damn word. Repeecheep as well is a swashbuckling mouse, and that's really all you need. Eddie Izzard plays him up in his typical rambling fashion, and he's pretty much brilliant in every scene he's in, save for the very end where he and Jesus have a conversation almost verbatim from the book and it showcases how, once again, C.S. Lewis knows shit about writing compelling dialogue.
The movie, however, suffers from the fact that it is a sequel. The set pieces begin to repeat themselves a fair bit this time around--within twenty minutes you are handed just about everything that the first movie spend an entire hour building up to, and once you have that, it's really just...bland. Oh look, centaurs! Oh look, minotaurs! Oh look, bloody fucking fauns! Oh, is that a dwarf? How precious! There's really nothing NEW in Narnia--unlike all the other books, Prince Caspian doesn't really play into its fantastical side at all, so we're really watching a story being staged in the exact same way the last film was, except that the budget is bigger. Even the music is the same--Harry Gregson Williams, of Metal Gear Solid fame, is a brilliant composer and the soundtrack for the first movie was the best part, but he got really fucking lazy for this one because he basically just reuses the same three tracks from the first movie over and over again, leaving the feeling of this whole thing being really stale all the more poignant.
Of course, with a bigger budget comes bigger...everything. There are two major battles in this movie, and each one is an agonizingly drawn out affair. The Lord of the Rings rip-offs are heavy in the air, especially at the end of the final battle, but there's a very obvious attempt to make this movie more "epic" than its predecessor, but in the process of doing so, it sort of rings false. In Lion, the witch and the Wardrobe, the book itself is relatively spartan, so sprucing up the tale is a perfectly good thing--it adds more content for the movie viewer and allows the terribly dull climax of the book to be spiced up with an epic battle sequence. In Prince Caspian, however, there really isn't any SPACE for a big battle sequence. The conflict is concluded with an epic sword duel between Peter and Miraz (because, in the book, Peter is infallible and so does everything important himself, reducing Caspian to pretty window dressing) and the war is done and over.
In this movie, thanks to the subplot of political strife and turmoil going on inside the Telmarine government, the duel happens, but it just leads into another huge battle sequence that just seems to be a rehash of the first movie's fighting. There's some cleverness, but at the same time, in this movie, the bad guys are all humans. Considering that Peter and Susan are killing people about every five scenes, this starts to get a fair bit disturbing, especially since this is a children's story. In the first film, the bad guys were all big monstrous bulls, and that was fucking sweet, because we got to see a sort of battle we don't see too often, with cleverness and originality.
This time, we get centaurs fighting conquistadores. Woo.
So, in conclusion, what can I say? If you weren't totally thrilled by the first movie, skip this one. It doesn't offer the excitment or the originality of Speed Racer, and if you want to please your little kids, Speed Racer is definitely the better choice. It's more of the same--it takes very few risks and it offers very few innovations, and while the conflict between Peter and Caspian is actually engaging and genuinely interesting, and Edmund is actually a great character who gives the movie some level-headed grace, the movie seems overly full of itself, begging you to be blown away by how epic it is, or expecting your souls to be changed by how Jesus can save everybody right when it's most convienient for him, but it ultimately can't really deliver either of those two goals, and so it's really just a worse version of the first film.
Rent it, at best.
Go see Speed Racer.
