The second film in the series trades Christian allegory for violent spectacle, writes Donald Clarke
WHAT WE have here is, perhaps, a Narnia film for people who don't like Narnia. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a massive success in 2005, made a decent fist of concealing CS Lewis's twee Christian moralising behind a mass of horned demons, talking fish and tap-dancing beavers (am I remembering this right?).
For all that, a faint stench of ancient Sunday afternoons still hung around the film. One felt oneself trapped in front of a telly from the era when, on the Lord's Day, national broadcasters only allowed improving material before children. Remember all those warnings about precipitating the Fall of Man by eating too much Turkish delight? Aslan the Magic Lion and his pompous life lessons? Give me mindless, godless violence any day.
Which brings us to (or somewhere near) Prince Caspian. Okay, you couldn't exactly mistake the second Narnia film for a video nasty - very little blood is spilled in the copious battle sequences - but you'd be unlikely to take it for a product of the Happy Jesus Ministries either. Both beasts and humans seem grumpier, louder and less inclined towards compromise. More of the story seems to take place at night. The children are snappier. This is a Narnia film you can get your fangs into.
As in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, director Andrew Adamson wisely decides to restrict the wartime prologue to a brief vignette. It is a year after the events in the first film and the four Pevensie children are lurking grumpily in the Strand tube station. Suddenly a surge of special effects carries them back to the kingdom they helped save. After rooting round a few crumbling castles, they realise that many hundreds of years have passed and the Narnian people (plus a few elves, minotaurs, centaurs and juggling weasels) have been cast into exile by a cadre of incongruously Mediterranean warriors named the Telmarines.
The occupying forces - please tell me the film isn't about Iraq - have political problems of their own. In the opening minutes we learn that Miraz (the excellent Sergio Castellitto), the Telmarine King, is plotting to place his newborn son on the throne in place of Prince Caspian (dull Ben Barnes), the rightful heir.
After some social unpleasantness, the shiny-cheeked prince rides off into the forest and falls in with a pair of angry dwarves, played by the perennially grand Warwick Davis and the reliably mean-spirited Peter Dinklage. The little people reluctantly join forces with Caspian and, ultimately the returning Pevensies, to overthrow the despotic rulers. Everybody shouts a lot while waving really big swords.
There is still a residual strain of Christian allegory about the place. Lucy (Georgie Henley), the youngest child, can't understand why her brothers and sisters need to actually see Aslan to believe that he still lives. It's all about faith, do you see? But, for the most part, the film is taken up with elaborate battle sequences and effective PG horror that would struggle to find a home in any Sunday School syllabus.
It's a shame that Tilda Swinton's White Witch has left the story, but the malevolent turn by Castellitto almost fills the icy gap, and the supporting performances by Davis and Dinklage are more amusing than anything in Part One.
Mind you, the film has disappointed some critics and viewers in the US, who have publicly wondered whether it counts as family film. It's a fair question.
If you were trying to sell a picture to the National Council for Scaredy Cats, you would hardly describe it as a relentlessly noisy amalgam of A Bridge Too Farand Braveheart. If, however, you were selling the film to people who were wary of CS Lewis then that might be just the right line to take. Tally ho, comrades.
