Wednesday I went out and saw the new Chronicles of Narnia movie, Prince Caspian. We largely decided to go because the local theater offers a particular movie every week for $5 and this week it was Prince Caspian. That being said, this book and the Silver Chair were two of my favorite books in the series so I was pretty excited to see the movie.
The movie overall was fairly bad. It was such a large departure from the first movie in tone that I honestly felt that it was done by an entirely different director, but I checked imdb.com afterwards, and sure enough same guy. I don’t exactly know what the deal is, maybe it is the fault of CS Lewis and my bad memory, but this movie seemed way worse than the first.
The first real issue I had was with the effects. The budget was $20 million more than the previous movie, but it looked and felt like a budget of just a portion of it. The effects were just really bad. Wikipedia seemed to suggest that they didn’t have as much time in this movie on effects as the previous movie, and maybe this is why the effects were so much worse. Maybe it was because the bulk of the money was spent on the big battle scene and not the individual closeup scenes and thus the money went to something you didn’t really notice as much. Whatever the issue… the effects were very amatuerish here. In particular creature animations were just really terrible and this is what I think Narnia is all about so I think it is a shame.
I’ve seen many people rave of the music in this movie, but I thought it was nearly non-existant. This could actually be taken as a compliment, but I didn’t think so. They hocked one song from the first movie and used a modern song (which the previous movie did not do to my recollection). There really was nothing else.
The fight scenes were good, but this movie really suffered from the old hack and slash but no blood issue. I know that they were trying to keep the movie kid friendly, but honestly it was distracting that they would “insinuate” a head being cut off, with no blood whatsoever.
Character development was… I don’t know… well I felt throughout the movie that I was getting the ends of stories. There was no development so to speak, just the result of an invisible development. It was as if they decided to cut out the development in favor of more pictures of soldiers marching accross the bridge. I’m not sure if this actually was a book fault however so I can’t say it was entirely the fault of the movie.
The one bright spot of this movie compared to the first was the acting. Well the acting per say… the four kids did much better at acting this time around, in particular I think Anna Popplewell who played Susan did a very good job in this film and should be proud of this performance. The new characters in the story were all cast by really good actors as well (Sergio Castellitto, Ben Barnes, Pierfrancesco Favino, and Vincent Grass). The acting I felt went from a weakness in the first to a strength in the second movies.
I give the movie a solid D+ or C-. It had its high points, the battles were good, the costumes were great, the acting was good. But overall, this movie had serious plot and effect issues which for this series should have been high points. Hopefully they get back on track for the next movie. I would hate to see this movie series fall to the wasteside before Silver Chair, but as it is Voyage may be the last one, if not Prince Caspian.