Summer of Popcorn II: Prince Caspian
When Andrew Adamson's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe first came out, I heard a lot of comments along the lines of "but what is a big, Hollywood studio going to do with the specifically Christian messages woven throughout Lewis's stories?" The worry was, I think, largely founded. Hollywood seems to show a marked trend of misunderstanding Christianity, Gibson's personally driven Passion being perhaps the only exception in recent memory.
The odd thing about Prince Caspian is that, in general, the specifically Christian allegory is about the only thing the film consistently gets right. Aslan's relative absence, Lucy's longing for the peace and beauty of Narnia, Edmund's penitance, all are there. Better yet, the movie chooses perhaps the best through-line for the child protagonists. Peter starts as a brawling kid, desperate to return to his "rightful" place as an absolute monarch; the movie charts (in part) the folly of his pride and his eventual recognition that in order to grow up, it is necessary to leave the physical Narnia behind and find Aslan "in your own world." Maturity, indeed, is the theme for most characters in the film. Susan learns that "nothing happens the same way twice" and finds that faith in a distant Aslan is every bit as important as love for a present Aslan. Edmund balances his love of Aslan with the desire for solidarity with his brothers, and learns at least one new hard lesson about Peter's fallibility. Susan inexplicably discovers the joys of kissing a boy one is guaranteed never to see again. The world itself has "grown up," though in a much less healthy manner--the desire for "Turkish Delights" has sophisticated into a political network of self-serving backstabbing and manipulation of hereditary conventions.
The problem with Prince Caspian as an adaptation is that maturity was only one (and the least memorable) of the two themes found in Lewis's novel. The problem with Prince Caspian as an entertaining children's film is that the moral story-arc is only one (and the least emphasized) of the two elements in Adamson's film.
For readers of Lewis's novel, the first impression made by the novel is a profound sense of a mythic but lost past which becomes associated none-too-subtly with the wonder and magic of Greco-Roman paganism. From the first realization that Narnia's great castle is nothing but ruins to the climactic Bacchanal overseen by both Bacchus and Aslan, Lewis sets a sort of cultural regression in opposition to his coming-of-age narrative. As the characters mature, they mature beyond both the narrow-minded politics of self-centeredness and the cruelly pragmatic educational ideology of occupied Narnia. Yet they discover the youth and wonder of the real magic that has been there all along. As Lewis himself once commented, "when I was a child, I put away childish things--including the foolish desire to never appear childish." In this sense, Peter's maturity is of a distinctive kind. He may not be allowed to inhabit the gentle training-grounds of life in Narnia any longer, but it is only because he can find the same wonder--and the same moral struggles--in his own England. In opposition to the Talmarenes who forget their desires in pursuit of wealth and power, Peter retains true to the magic of his childhood by seeking to bring the moral vision into the superficially more prosaic land of England.
For viewers of Adamson's movie, the first impression is of a 21st Century "epic" in the vein of Braveheart, Gladiator, The Lord of the Rings, or even the earlier (and utterly forgettable) Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. In contrast to Lewis's scene (introduced later in the book) of a dark moonlit castle in which the part-dwarf professor introduces Caspian to the hidden truths of Narnia's magical past, we see a dark moonlit castle as the setting for a realistically painful childbirth, ridiculous attempted crossbow execution, and daring escape into Narnia's woods. Fantasy and imagination has been replaced with savage adventure, and the change is consistent throughout the book. Battle piles upon (unnecessarily inserted) battle, but the only point of divergence with movies seen before is the increase in unrealism. Crossbows treated as automatic weapons are irking enough, but how many people can Susan knock down with the edge of her bow before the battles reduce themselves to meaningless spectacle? The final battle of LWW was memorable as a battle of mythological heroes in individual combat; the most heroic element of Caspian's battles is the courage of an audience that persistently endures through wave after wave of CGI-critters in order to find out what will happen next to the protagonists. At least these battles have some meaningful relationship to the plot (if not enough to justify their length), but one wonders what purpose such endless (if bloodless) carnage serves other than to confuse younger audiences by celebrating the savagery in combat of the child-warrior-heroes.
Fortunately, Adamson's missteps are a misunderstanding of contemporary fantasy cinema as much as Lewis's chidren's story. The Lord of the Rings balanced battlefield spectacle with resonant magic and a constant sense of wonder; only the second (and inarguably worst) Harry Potter focused on numerous creatures rather than images of personality and beauty. It's not that Lewis's book couldn't make a great story, it is just that Adamson seems obsessed with copying the most superficial and easily copied externalities of contemporary fantasy. Before I saw Prince Caspian, I was concerned that the untraditional nature of Voyage of the Dawn Treader might make it a hard sell for audiences and sink any opportunities for further movies. Now, I'm just happy to see what happens when Adamson is given a story which is virtually impossible to turn into a neutered fantasy-war film. He seems to have a decent acquaintance with the characters as Lewis wrote them; maybe next time the audience will be able to spend the time required to get to know them.
