Bloodless battle scenes for the PG crowd
Prince Caspian a worthy yet violent chapter in the Narnia series

Last week I mentioned the fact that What Happens in Vegas could have been a funnier, restaurant-quality movie if the producers had gone for the gusto of an “R” rating. Instead, it relied heavily on PG-13 warhorses such as pratfalls and toilet humor to lure younger audiences into the theatre to watch 35-year-old Cameron Diaz and 30-year-old Ashton Kutcher act like spoiled teenagers.

Ben Barnes stars as the title character in in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

This week’s movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, suffers from a similar problem. It is a big, bold epic adventure about warring armies, swordfights, and fearsome beasts jumping on each other’s backs. In order to secure a PG rating, however, the makers of the film had to portray all of these intense battle scenes with a minimum of spilt blood. The result is as believable as those old sepia-toned cowboy movies where a gunfighter’s death scene consisted of him clutching his chest before hitting the dust with an agonizing “They got me!”

That semi-minor quibble aside, Prince Caspian is a more than worthy sequel to the first Chronicles of Narnia flick, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It is a darker, more adult version take on author C.S. Lewis’ adventure series, first written in the 1940s. The four actors who play the Pevensie siblings, like the young British actors in the Harry Potter films, are growing quite nicely into their roles, and the movie zips along briskly, despite its two-and-a-half hour running time.

At the end of the first film, Susan, Peter, Lucy and Edmund Pevensie (Anna Popplewell, William Moseley, Georgie Henley and Skandar Keynes) magically return to WWII-era Britain, after spending most of their adult lives in Narnia. Not only do they return to their homeland, but also to childhood, which always seemed to me to be the most perplexing and twisted aspect of this 20th century faerie tale (How does one go from an adult back to an 11-year old without counseling?).

Prince Caspian begins with the Pevensies a year older than when they first returned from Narnia. A magical subway station transports them back to Narnia, but what was only a year for them has been 1300 years for Narnia. The land is darker and more dangerous than when they ruled as kings and queens of Narnia, and the wondrous creatures of the place have been driven underground and into the deep woods by a civilization of humans known as the Telmarines.

Young Prince Caspian X (Ben Barnes) is set to become the next king of the Telmarines when his uncle and aunt, King Miraz (Sergio Castellitto) and Queen Prunaprismia (Alicia Borrachero) give birth to a son of their own. Miraz decides to have Caspian killed, but the prince’s tutor Doctor Cornelius (Vincent Grass) intervenes, sending him into the enchanted woods of Narnia with a magical horn. When Caspian blows the horn, it summons the four Pevensie children back into their roles as kings and queens of Narnia, although at their present ages (11-17).

Just as Lewis’ Narnia tales were compared to fellow-Brit J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings when they were first published, director Andrew Adamson’s Prince Caspian will no doubt be compared to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. With his extended battle scenes and fantastical renderings of the fictitious creatures, Adamson only brings those comparisons upon himself. With so much LOTR emulation going on in this film, he would have been wise to realize that going for a milder PG rating would only hamstring his efforts on bringing effectively believable battle scenes to the screen.

While The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe displayed Lewis’ story as a Christian allegory much more obviously, the new film is more of an adventure yarn. It keeps the action turned up for most of the film and adds the right amount of humor and romance to give the older kids something to talk about later. Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent) gives a wonderful performance as the dwarf Trumpkin and the subtle love affair between Caspian and Susan rings heartwarmingly true.

While the look of the CGI animals, especially the lion god Aslan, left plenty to be desired in the first film, things have improved drastically here. The entire menagerie in Prince Caspian, save for some clunky-moving centaurs, is fabulously rendered, both in close ups and in distant shots.

7:While the danger and violence might be a tad too heavy for the pre-teen crowd, Prince Caspian should be one of this summer’s more popular movies among their older brothers and sisters.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is rated PG for epic battle action and violence. It is currently playing at Regal Cinema in Boone.