Prince Caspian

A bunch of us went to see Prince Caspian last Friday; in fact, our lot was nearly the entire audience for the 12:30 showing. It was great. :-) I sat with Rebecca and her sisters and Amelia.

I thought the movie itself was mixed. I liked it, but it's got nothing like the worldview or depth or charm of the book. But I'll buy it when it comes out, because it's still one of the best fantasy movies I've seen.

It didn't understand Aslan, heroism, manliness, womanliness, kingship, chivalry, romance, solemnity, or what dryads and river-gods are doing in Narnia at all. (Which is awkward, seeing as those are major themes.) The less said about Susan the better, actually.

But Adamson is a skilled movie-maker. It was funny. Reepicheep had a great introduction: he got to single-paw-edly take out an entire Telmarine troop, and his voice was perfect, even though I had serious doubts about casting Izzard. And the CG! Reepicheep ran like a mouse! I've never seen a movie mouse that ran like a live one. My own mousies Bing and Merry would run like that if they had the great gift of being Talking Mice.

Aslan was better than in Wardrobe. The voice of Obi-Wan coming from Aslan still disturbs me, but he didn't have many lines, so that was all to the good really. And you could sort of see why Lucy loved him.

The way they played the Hag and Wer-Wolf was suitably creepy. But I never did get a proper look at the Wer-Wolf. He was always in deep shadow, and I wonder if they skimped on his costume. And then having Edmund be the one to demolish the White Witch was so appropriate, though they felt the need to let Caspian in his angst go much further toward black magic than in the book.

But the very best parts of the movie were the woods and the Telmarines. I would go to that forest. Immediately. Lucy's dream-scene, with the forest in golden light, was heartbreakingly lovely. And when you realized it was only a dream, it was more heartbreaking still: because in the book it was real.

They played the Telmarines as the descendants of Italian-Spanish brigands, and it so worked. The architecture, costumes, props, actors, accents, even the gardens, everything suited the Telmarines, both in beauty and cruelty. Doctor Cornelius' library felt like something out of an Italian Renaissance/New World castle, which was gorgeous--like I would expect from the Santa Fe Palace of the Governors, if it had been stone instead of adobe. The lordly conniving worked very well in that setting; but then, I think Adamson understands Telmarine scheming better than Narnian loyalty.

The jarring moment of getting a Spanish Caspian is when the young whatsit discovered Miraz killed his father. He went straight into Inigo Montoya mode. "You killed my father. Prepare to die!" Rebecca and I just rolled our eyes.

I was pleasantly surprised by--of all things--Queen Prunaprismia, Miraz's wife. She had a character, and a complex one at that, without being angsty. On the one hand, when she woke up to find her husband being menaced with a sword, she pulls out a bow and arrow. This strikes me as a perfectly reasonable and appropriate response, not Fiona-Xena-Warrior-Princess-Delusional at all (::cough, cough:: SUSAN). On the other hand, when she discovers said husband is a murderer and regicide to boot, she doesn't actually like it very much. She was great.

So there you have it. I liked it; it's not the best possible screen adaptation of Prince Caspian. Personally, I'm praying that in another generation or so, we'll get a director who can show the parts of the book that I loved: the kinds of goodness that moderns don't understand at all.