Leo ex machina

National Review, June 16, 2008 by Ross Douthat

THE first time I tried to read The Chronicles of Narnia from start to finish, I gave up somewhere in the middle third of Prince Caspian--after the long flashback to the prince's childhood in his usurping uncle's court, but before the Pevensie children finished wandering (and wandering, and wandering) in circles through the Narnian woods. This was a temporary setback to my Narniaphilia, and many re-readings later I can testify that Caspian has more virtues than I apprehended at the age of seven. But even now it remains my least favorite volume in C. S. Lewis's saga, which in turn made it the Chronicles book that I was the most sanguine about seeing released to the tender mercies of the Hollywood blockbuster machine.

The good news is that the machine-embodied in this case by Andrew Adamson, who's done better by Narnia than his past association with the execrable Shrek franchise had led me to expect--has made something entertaining out of it. The bad news is that the result bears only a superficial resemblance to the sort of stories Lewis told. Prince Caspian is an epic fantasy rather than an intimate one--clanking rather than charming, martial rather than theological, and designed for teenagers (the core of the ticket-buying public, after all) instead of the children Lewis wrote for. In certain respects it's a better film than the more faithful adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe a few years back. But it's a strikingly less Narnian film, sacrificing the particularities of the book that it's adapting to create a considerably more generic entertainment.

Adamson's best decision is to start the movie in midstream, dispensing with the novel's layer of flashback and dropping us immediately into Narnia. A thousand years have passed since the last movie, and the country has been overrun by the swarthy, conquistadorish Telmarines; the "Old Narnians" --talking beasts, dwarves, and so on--survive in hidden communities deep within the forests, their very existence denied by the Telmarine rulers. The film kicks off with a woman screaming in childbirth--the first of many deliberately adult touches in a movie that barely slips in at PG--as she bears a son for Miraz (Sergio Castellitto), the villainous Lord Protector who's holding the Telmarine throne in trust for his nephew Caspian (Ben Barnes). In trust, that is, until he has an heir of his own, at which point Miraz means to kill the prince and clear a path to the throne for his own issue.

Caspian is unsophisticated enough not to see this coming, but his kindly tutor, Cornelius (Vincent Grass), alerts him to the danger, and he flees the palace one step ahead of his uncle's assassins. Taking refuge in the forest, he falls in with a trio of Old Narnians and eventually assumes the leadership of the Narnian resistance; along the way, he blows a magical, help-summoning horn that Cornelius has bestowed upon him, which yanks the Pevensies off an English railway platform and back into Narnia.

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The four children--Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes), and Lucy (Georgie Henley)--are only a year older than they were in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, since time passes considerably more slowly in our world than in Narnia. (The actors, though, are three years older, and time has improved their dramatic chops, though at the cost of mitigating Lucy's cuteness.) In England, they were struggling to adjust to being schoolchildren again, rather than the kings and queens that they had become; back in Narnia, they have to struggle to adjust to their status as Arthurian-style legends in a land that's become "a more savage place than you remember," as a brooding Old Narnian puts it.

The movie plays up these tensions; indeed, it plays up every tension it finds in Lewis's novel, and invents several more, creating rivalries (between Peter and Caspian), generating romances (between Susan and Caspian), adding battles (particularly a long set piece in the movie's middle, in which the Old Narnians launch a raid on Miraz's castle), and doubling down on the political intrigue in the Telmarine court. For the most part, the additions serve their purpose, transmuting a somewhat slight children's adventure into a gripping medieval war picture: Braveheart with more magic, or Tolkien with talking squirrels.

But this achievement comes with a price--namely, the evisceration of Lewis's major theme. If The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a story about rebirth and renewal--Aslan resurrected, and spring cracking the ice of an enchanted winter-then Prince Caspian is fundamentally a story about re-enchantment, and the glorious return of the supernatural forces that the Telmarines have repressed. Little of this survives in Adamson's adaptation; it's been pruned away to make room for battles and arguments and longing glances and one-liners. The book's climax, in which the trees and rivers come to life and a wild pagan rout overruns the sterile secularism of Telmarine society, is reduced to a brief battlefield intervention that rips off not one but two scenes in Lord of the Rings. Aslan, too, is reduced to a walk-on role, sweeping in once the body count has climbed and the CGI budget been exhausted to roar a halt to the proceedings. He murmurs about faith, in the voice of Liam Neeson, but he feels less a Christ figure than a strikingly flimsy plot device: Leo ex machina.