Movie Review: The Chronicles of Narnia – Prince Caspian

At the recommendation of my cousin, I saw the new Narnia movie today. I don’t know if I absolutely hate it or if I liked it, but I do have a wide variety of adjectives that I can use to describe the movie (hang on tight):

Been-there-done-that, awkward, Harry Potter, brilliant graphics, so-so story, great story, horrible, poor camera views, abysmal acting, tired, old, fun to watch, good (though darker) family movie, pretty much what I expected, Lord of the Rings, random

And it’s that last adjective – random – that I think carries throughout the entire movie. For example, the four siblings are randomly drawn back into Narnia after Prince Caspian blows a magical horn. We get about 2 minutes of the family in the real world before they are sucked into a Harry Potter-like train scene where they wind up in their fantasy land after the train goes away.

Skip FAR ahead to the end of the movie. You have Susan running up to Prince Caspian and giving him one of the most awkward kisses in movie history. It was out of place and inappropriate for the scene and really took away from the storyline where Susan and Peter will never be coming back to Narnia. I don’t know why they tried to wedge the love story in there, but I guess that’s how movies are these days.

A little bit before the end of the movie you have two more random scenes. The first is Aslan randomly appearing in the forest to save Lucy. Yeah, I paid attention and I know what was going on here in terms of the siblings needing to prove themselves to Aslan in order to have him come back. Frankly, this aspect of the story sucked. It had a poor setup (due in part to the horrible acting by Georgie Henley as Lucy) and it had a random and awkward payoff (Aslan comes in and saves the day – boring). The few minutes where the White Witch almost made a comeback was MUCH more intriguing than the poor storyline that was Aslan in this movie.

And since I just mentioned it, Georgie Henley was not good in this movie at all. AT ALL. She has got to be one of the worst child actors out there right now. I understand Disney’s need to keep all of the same characters and even I would say that I’d rather see her playing Lucy than someone else, but damn – someone give the girl some acting lessons.

The second random scene at the end of the movie was the water man who came and destroyed all of the Telmarines. In the Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring, Eowyn talks about how the power of her people will protect the Hobbits if they can only cross the river. Then she says a little magic diddy after she crosses the river and the water rises to destroy the Nazgul chasers. It seems to me that Director Andrew Adamson must have watched this scene way too much because the battle-ending scene at the end of Narnia was far too similar. Again, I go back to my list of adjectives and been-there-done-that.

Then you have the use of killer trees (again, a la the Lord of the Rings). While I didn’t really want to see this in Narnia (I already saw Lord of the Rings, which is a much better movie, many times), I admit that I don’t have too much of a problem with it. For those of you that don’t know, CS Lewis (author of The Chronicles of Narnia) and JRR Tolkien (author of The Lord of the Rings) were friends and a sort of pen pals. They were both disgusted at the post-industrial society that the Western world had created where the environment was trampled on a daily basis. This is why you see a reliance on the strength of nature in both of their novel series.

It looks like this movie is being written off as a stinker already, too. As the folks at The-Numbers.com suggest, “Weekend Estimates: Caspian Second Disappointment of Summer.” It looks like Caspian has made $56.5 million so far while Ironman is up around $222 million. None of this matters, though, as Indiana Jones is going to house the entire box office.

And yet after all of this criticism, I don’t think that Narnia was a bad movie…I just don’t think it was a good movie. I guess if you have young ones and you want to keep them busy for two hours (two and a half – commercials at the beginning of the movie), then you should go out and see this at a matinee (no need to spend the extra money to go any later). However, if you’re a fan of the novels – and God bless you if you could get through Prince Caspian as a novel – I suggest going at a time of the day when you’re not going to spend a lot to see the movie or just waiting for it to come out on DVD.