Narnia

I must speak the truth.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian isn’t really that good. Yes, I know lots of critics and even friends are saying it is. But I respectfully disagree.

It is easy to understand why people are saying they like it. It does a pretty good job of pulling the wool over your eyes and tricking you into thinking you just watched some sort of spectacle.

But at the end of the day Caspian is only a hollow attempt at making an epic fantasy like Lord of the Rings. The movie feels like it was phoned in just to rake in a pay day.

The script is so horribly bad that many of the jokes have to be broadcast to the viewer. Almost every joke in the film is repeated 8 times just so the audience can finally understand that they were trying to be funny.

The infamous added fight scene is a disaster. Why would you add a fight scene to the original story in which your heroes fail?

We’re constantly shown fantastical creatures with absolutely no character development. The poor leader of the centaurs is in almost every scene but we don’t even know his name. He has to be more interesting than High King Peter and Prince Caspian.

Then there’s the tiny little romance between Susan and Caspian. I haven’t seen such a hollow romantic subplot in some time. They kiss at the end, but I’m not quite sure why. I guess because all of those glances at each other was really building up a relationship.

And the villain is a joke. At least the White Witch was an interesting villain. In this respect, perhaps the source material kept the script on a leash. Or perhaps he was just poorly portrayed.

C.S. Lewis wrote these books for a reason. He had a point.

Since this script pretty much flushes that down the toilet, Aslan comes across as a punk who likes to watch people suffer.

I understand that Aslan represents Christ and that there are elements of faith that have to be played out to gain his assistance. But when that is stripped from the movie, you just see an extremely powerful character standing by doing nothing when he could be saving everyone.

This script got caught somewhere between being faithful to the source material and trying to make an action fantasy blockbuster. In such situations, one would hope that they would keep the good stuff from the source and add good stuff for the blockbuster.

They seemed to have done the opposite. They stripped the meaningful stuff out of the source, and added meaningless stuff back in. Utter disaster.

As I read people praising this film, I felt myself getting increasingly agitated that they missed all of the glaring flaws of the movie. That’s how I knew it was bad.

It will keep you entertained and it may fool you into thinking that it’s a good movie — but it’s really not and C.S. Lewis would definitely not be proud.

Verdict: C- Tilt: F