Back to Narnia, Where the Gryphons Roam
When "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" racked up a worldwide box-office gross of nearly $750 million in 2005, it seemed a safe bet that, with six books left in author C. S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia" series, the franchise was not going away anytime soon. The second entry in the series, "Prince Caspian," directed and co-written, like the first, by New Zealand-born "Shrek" helmer Andrew Adamson, opens today. If the new film is a reliable forecast of what to expect from the remaining five, the series' commercial staying power might not be such a bad thing.
Unlike its predecessor, "Prince Caspian" opens in Narnia, or at least in the kingdom next door. In the 1,300 years since the events depicted in the "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," a race of Mediterranean-featured humans, called Telemarines, has taken over, and the magic bloom has worn off the Narnian rose. What once was a land of mythical enchantment has become a nation of terrestrial conspiracy. Awakened in the middle of the night, young Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes), heir to the Telemarine throne, barely escapes the homicidal machinations of his uncle Miraz (Sergio Castellitto), whose own royal ambitions bloomed after his wife gave birth to a son. Pursued by his uncle's swordsmen, Caspian rides into the Narnian forest, where a high-speed collision with a tree branch introduces him to two dwarves and a talking badger — examples of the literally underground movement that most Telemarines aren't aware exists in the deep growth beyond their castle walls.
Meanwhile, in World War II-era London (faithfully and impressively re-created on the digitally augmented streets of modern-day Prague), the Pevensie children — Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy (William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Skandar Keynes, and Georgie Henley, respectively) — awkwardly adjust to their resumed childhoods as English school children after spending a lifetime as Narnian kings in the previous film. Peter, the eldest, is particularly resentful of providence turning his adult sword back into a high schooler's pen. "I think it's time to accept that we live here," Susan says, resignedly, just as a world away Caspian summons the Pevensies back to Narnia by sounding Lucy's magic hunting horn.
"I wonder who lived here," one of the Pevensies asks as they wander through strangely familiar Narnian ruins. "I think we did," comes the reply. United with Caspian and a growing following of beasts and creatures real and mythic, the return of "the kings and queens of old" is initially a case of "be careful what you wish for." The legendary heroes of ancient Narnia are back, but they barely fit into their old armor.
"You may find Narnia a more savage place than you remember," a dwarf named Trumpkin (Peter Dinklage) cautions. His warning applies to the audience as well. After enduring the neutered, squeaky-clean, and safety-obsessed world of the Wachowskis' big-screen "Speed Racer," the nearly wall-to-wall battles in "Prince Caspian," a film whose predecessor staged discussions of confrontations more than the fights themselves, come as a guilty relief. The film features a nighttime commando raid utilizing gryphons as stand-ins for choppers, multiple horseback chases, digitally augmented massed attacks and cavalry charges, and a prolonged scene of man-boy hand-to-hand combat. Together, they fall somewhere between the latter-day "Star Wars" films and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy on the scale of sustained stately mayhem. With the possible exception of the mass executions of ambulatory brooms and animated demons in "Fantasia," "Prince Caspian" may boast the highest body count of any film bearing the Disney brand.
Eventually, of course, it turns out that Aslan, Lewis's regal leonine embodiment of the Anglican God, has been watching from a distance all along. "Things never happen the same way twice, dear one," Aslan tells Lucy in the voice of Liam Neeson. True enough. Though Mr. Adamson and his screenwriting collaborators, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, have mucked about here and there with character motivations and (mercifully) modernized the female roles from how they were portrayed in Lewis's book, "Prince Caspian" proves surprising and diverting enough even if one is familiar with the written "Chronicles of Narnia." It may not achieve the unique mixture of transcendence, graceful sentiment, and mythic suppleness that the book offers when read aloud by my father, for example, but what movie could?
As the credits roll, though, "Prince Caspian" feels like a stopgap en route to the next film, "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader." The most richly ecstatic and unabashedly religious of the series, "Dawn Treader," which is already in preproduction, and which Mr. Adamson has declined to direct, may prove to be the series' unfilmable downfall. In the meantime, "Prince Caspian" is an agreeably elephantine way to pass two hours and 20 minutes that could easily have felt like 1,000 years, but mercifully do not.
