Lords and swords
'Narnia' fantasy charges into battle mode with 'Prince Caspian'
In the closing minutes of "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian," there comes a misjudgment of filmmaking and cross-marketing so colossal that it very nearly wrecks the movie. It certainly spoils the spell of fierce, ahistorical faerie struggle that has been painstakingly built up in the previous 2 1/2 hours.
It is a pop song. A goopy ballad called "The Call," to be precise, by the singer-songwriter Regina Spektor, who really should have known better. (Not when
It's especially a shame because the movie has been rolling along nicely until then. A muscular fantasy epic that marks a filmmaking improvement if not a leap in dramatic inspiration over 2005's "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," "Prince Caspian" reveals this series as conceived ever more clearly as a junior-league "Lord of the Rings." New Zealand again provides the vast, primal landscapes; the endless rendering farms of Peter Jackson's Weta Digital (among several other special-effects companies) provide the computerized window-dressing. There are clashing battles and surly dwarves and movable trees. If there aren't any hobbits, it's probably because they couldn't get the work visas.
In the process, this "Prince Caspian" strips the air of engaged Oxford gentility from the novel penned by C.S. Lewis and replaces it with state-of-the-art multiplex action. If you love the Narnia books - their quiet but persuasive narrative flow, the spiritual ideals churning gently beneath - you may want to steer clear of this movie, which is solid but very noisy, and only occasionally truly magical.
With the book's prose removed, too, "Prince Caspian" is more obviously a war movie for young audiences, which made sense when Lewis was writing in the wake of World War II and makes an unfortunate kind of sense today. Specifically, it's about how to deal with conflict in the absence of God.
Oops, I meant Aslan. The great lion (voiced once again by Liam Neeson) is gone for most of this second film, and without that beacon the Narnians struggling against the Telmarines - suspiciously ethnic human invaders with e-e-evil accents led by King Miraz (Italian actor Sergio Castellitto) - are forced to make their own decisions. These tend to be based on vanity rather than faith, and you know what the Lord thinks about that. Sorry, Aslan; promise I won't do it again.
"Prince Caspian" gets started with a bang, with the birth of Miraz's son and the fleeing into the wilderness of the rightful Telmarine king, young Caspian X. He's played by the British actor Ben Barnes in a patent bid to get teenage girls to throw over their Orlando Bloom fansites, and he's effectively noble and handsome.
Blowing the magic horn passed to him by his half-Narnian tutor (Vincent Grass in minor Dumbledore mode), Caspian summons the four Pevensies from late-'40s England: stalwart Peter (William Moseley), doughty (and rather dull) Susan (Anna Popplewell), clever Edmund (Skandar Keynes), and faithful Lucy (Georgie Henley).
To their surprise, hundreds of Narnian years have passed to their one, and the film effectively conveys the awful grandeur of their ruined palace. It also conveys the shock of the Narnians that their legendary kings and queens are a quartet of children. The fine actor Peter Dinklage ("The Station Agent"), playing the dwarf Trumpkin, takes over point position from the first movie's James McAvoy, and his immensely sad-eyed surliness is one of the most comic yet poignant aspects of "Prince Caspian." (He does resemble Ringo Starr as a small homeless man, though.)
There's a talking badger, voiced by Ken Stott and not as convincing as the beavers in "Lion," and a large, charming, sword-wielding mouse named Reepicheep (Eddie Izzard), reminiscent of Puss in Boots from the "Shrek" movies but much tougher. There are centaurs and giants and fauns, oh my. Tilda Swinton returns for one scene as the White Witch and momentarily freezes the movie's blood in its veins. One of the more eerily beautiful sequences in "Caspian" involves a nighttime assault on Miraz's castle by the heroes, born aloft by gryphons and swooping silently and lethally down upon the battlements.
This turns out to be a bad idea in the long run, and the moral of "Prince Caspian" is that decisions made without consulting one's heart (or faith, or, um, inner lion) are usually foolhardy. Of the four children, only Lucy sticks to the true path, and by movie's end she's practically a nun for Aslan. Henley, who has matured from the sprite of the first film, makes this quiet devotion work, which can't be said for the mild romance the filmmakers try to cook up between Caspian and Susan. The characters of Susan and Peter will be largely gone from the next installment, "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" (due in 2010), and I can't say I'll miss them. When Moseley's gauche Peter takes on Castellitto's Miraz in a climactic swordfight, the battle's too lopsided to be credible.
Take away the storming music and grand vistas, and it's all a standard sword-and-sorcery adventure; director Andrew Adamson is more than a journeyman but much less than the visionary Peter Jackson is. In his hands, though, the "Narnia" movies have dealt with Lewis's underlying Christian themes as well as can be expected, neither stressing them nor pretending they don't exist.
In the process, the message becomes clear for those who care to scratch the summer-movie surface: You can't win without faith, either in a metaphorical lion or the deity he stands in for (who is most assuredly not the god of swarthy Telmarines). "Prince Caspian" may be effective entertainment, but Walden Media, the production company backed by Christian billionaire Philip Anschutz, has given American family audiences something they really don't need at the moment: A primer on the benefits of holy war.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/movienation.
