While not screened by WW press deadlines, the second coming of the Big Friendly Jesus Lion did not waltz to its massive payday without first tormenting the critics:
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
It was almost certainly not the intention of the filmmakers behind The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian that their highly virtuous production should cause me to entertain impure thoughts. But off they went and cast Anna Popplewell as Susan, the eldest daughter of the Pevensie family, and that was that—all their best intentions led to one film critic propelling himself through the doldrums of another C. S. Lewis movie, kept afloat only by lust. What else was I supposed to be looking at, anyway? There were a bunch of talking badgers and some minotaurs and several hundred people clanking about in vaguely Nordic armor—and there was also a 19-year-old with the most fetchingly swollen lips this side of Angelina Jolie, and she was running around shooting arrows and wearing bodices that were patently designed to be ripped. I don’t care if it’s a children’s movie, and a Christian children’s movie: Who wouldn’t notice this girl?
Actually, I can imagine that large portions of the audience would not notice Anna Popplewell and her sumptuous lips: Prince Caspian is, after all, the sort of filmmaking designed to appeal to the most bloodless, conformist camps of modern evangelicalism. In assembling the sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—which was not a very good movie either, but at least contained some handsome pictures of furniture—director Andrew Adamson has compounded his errors from his first effort, and once again we’ve handed a series of battles shot from a long distance, so that half the film looks like a Where’s Waldo? cartoon on a magical battlefield. Once again, Aslan the lion gets a good deal less screen time than you might expect, and when he does show up, he’s a drag: He reminded me less of Jesus than of the lordly, smug kid who always gets to play Jesus in youth group skits. He shows up, roars a couple of commanding lines in the voice of Liam Neeson, and all the other CGI animals bow down to him. Never has a deus ex machina been so literal.
The movie’s troubles may stem from the source material—Prince Caspian is not exactly the most cohesive book C. S. Lewis ever wrote, and is bogged down by many pages of political intrigue in the land of the Telmarines, who sound like nautical phone-bank workers but are in fact monarchists who took over Narnia from the Narnians, and went on to have internal battles too convoluted and boring to recount here. (The titular hero is an heir to the Telmarine throne, although actor Ben Barnes appears to interpret the role as a community-theater Inigo Montoya.) The film’s message echoes uncomfortably as well: Should megachurched children really be given heroes who battle incessantly over a holy land until a god-king smites their enemies?
But I suspect the chief reason that Prince Caspian is a dull, enervating experience is because the land the Pevensies keep visiting is produced by computer technicians pushing buttons to make a movie that looks as much as possible like other bland fantasy movies—with the same talking animals and clanking soldiers and ambulatory trees all wandering through the same artificial glades. (Little wonder that my eyes were drawn to someone who was incontestably alive.) Prince Caspian is a triumph of the synthetic, and one more victory for moviemakers who don’t like movies.
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is rated PG. (Many supporting characters die, but by some miracle none of them bleed from their fatal sword wounds.) It opens today at Broadway Metro 4 Theatres, Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century Eastport 16, Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 & IMAX, Cinetopia, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lake Twin Cinema, Lloyd Center Stadium 10 Cinema, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Moreland Theatre, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Oak Grove 8 Cinemas, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Sandy Cinemas, Sherwood Stadium 10, St. Johns Twin Cinemas and Pub, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Vancouver Plaza 10 Cinema, and Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.
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Tags: Ill-Considered Remarks
the makers of Prince Caspian kept to the original story surprisingly well, all thinks considered… i heard they were going to make it into a silly pure-action flick, but thankfully this was not the case http://www.kogmedia.com