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orichalcum at 12:34am on 17/05/2008 under movies
orichalcum at 12:34am on 17/05/2008 under moviesHaiku Review:
Many battle scenes,
Susan and Lucy so rawk!
Very true to book.
Well, the diversity of official reviews seemed to suggest that either you would love or hate this movie. True enough, I loved it and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cerebralpaladin hated it.
What did I love? How true it was to the book in many minor details, the immense coolness of both Susan and Lucy, my favorite Talking Animal of all time, Reepicheep (voiced by Eddie Izzard, folks!hca might want to see it for this alone, as Reepicheep seems like a very hcaish sort of character), and some gorgeous set and costume design work. You should keep in mind here that I'm probably a bigger fan of the Narnia books and world than of any other childhood series (maybe Prydain comes close, but both certainly beat Middleearth.) I think I read Prince Caspian at least 17 times (I stopped counting after I'd read all the books except Silver Chair and Last Battle 17 times), and so I'm the fangirl in the audience sitting there going, "Oh good, they've got the Brown Bear as one of the Heralds!" So for me, it really worked, in that it didn't tarnish any of my memories.
cerebralpaladin, while he liked the Narnia books as a kid, had virtually no memory of the plot. And well, he had some deep moral and tactical qualms with the way that Adamson chose to represent various scenes and choices. These really impaired his ability to enjoy the film.
So mostly, I would say, if you remember liking the book, you'll probably love the movie. If not - maybe less so.
And in an amusing non-spoilery note, they totally played on one of my major points of childhood confusion from the book - how exactly Edmund could have a _torch_ in his backpack.
N.B:cerebralpaladin has now listed his major objections in a spoilerific comment below; read at your own risk.
Many battle scenes,
Susan and Lucy so rawk!
Very true to book.
Well, the diversity of official reviews seemed to suggest that either you would love or hate this movie. True enough, I loved it and
cerebralpaladin hated it.What did I love? How true it was to the book in many minor details, the immense coolness of both Susan and Lucy, my favorite Talking Animal of all time, Reepicheep (voiced by Eddie Izzard, folks!
hca might want to see it for this alone, as Reepicheep seems like a very hcaish sort of character), and some gorgeous set and costume design work. You should keep in mind here that I'm probably a bigger fan of the Narnia books and world than of any other childhood series (maybe Prydain comes close, but both certainly beat Middleearth.) I think I read Prince Caspian at least 17 times (I stopped counting after I'd read all the books except Silver Chair and Last Battle 17 times), and so I'm the fangirl in the audience sitting there going, "Oh good, they've got the Brown Bear as one of the Heralds!" So for me, it really worked, in that it didn't tarnish any of my memories.cerebralpaladin, while he liked the Narnia books as a kid, had virtually no memory of the plot. And well, he had some deep moral and tactical qualms with the way that Adamson chose to represent various scenes and choices. These really impaired his ability to enjoy the film.So mostly, I would say, if you remember liking the book, you'll probably love the movie. If not - maybe less so.
And in an amusing non-spoilery note, they totally played on one of my major points of childhood confusion from the book - how exactly Edmund could have a _torch_ in his backpack.
N.B:
cerebralpaladin has now listed his major objections in a spoilerific comment below; read at your own risk.
happy
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Er, um, also, isn't "torch" British for "flashlight?"
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But as I only Thursday night got to see Ironman, who knows if I'll get to this one in the theater? We can hope.
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I'm going to try to lj-cut the spoilers-- I don't know if it will work in a comment.
Prince Stupid (part 2 of the Idiots of Narnia): the entire plot depends on Prince Caspian totally screwing up an attack on the enemy castle because he insists on being stupid and doing things that could totally be done later not once, but twice. It's helped along by High King Peter the Moronic being too busy being annoyed with Caspian and trying to one-up him that he's unable to adapt a plan to the fact that Caspian is crazy and stupid. Having been really stupid for a while, they then return to their base, so Caspian can advance the plot by being stupid in an entirely different way. Also, the whole plot relies on the fact that Peter the Moronic and Susan the Inconsistently Dumb decide that the logical conclusion is that Aslan has abandoned them and that Lucy is lying or delusional. This seems, shall we say, ridiculous after the first book/movie. Indeed, Edmund the Making-up-for-last-time points out explicitly, last time I didn't listen to Lucy, I ended up looking stupid, but to no avail. Yes, they're kids. But they're also the Kings and Queens of Narnia of legend, who ruled for more than a decade and still remember that all. Feh.
The morality really bugged me. They slaughter vast numbers of faceless human soldiers, apparently without remorse or qualms. (And I don't mean cause to be killed in battle-- they personally stab them, shoot them full of arrows, and lop off their heads.) I'm okay with that-- it's a war after all. But when they're confronted with the people who are directly responsible for all of this-- practically moustache twirling over the top villains, who really are directly comparable to Hitler and the head of the SS, up to and including plotting genocide-- then they are all about mercy and unwilling to kill and all of that. Apparently, having a face and a name makes you matter. Indeed, not one of the named villains whose faces we see gets killed by our heroes. As for all of the regular soldiers (and their horses, which given that this is Narnia matter)-- the Kings and Queens care more about a single feral bear than all of the human soldiers put together (literally). This really upset me, especially because our heroes, who are portrayed as being people whose morality we care about, slaughter vast numbers of soldiers whose principal mistake was to be born into the system of the enemy.
To be continued...
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Pastoralism/Anti-industrialism: The movie tells us that the villains are evil and genocidal. But it really shows us more or less two instances of their profound evil: they plot against themselves nastily and they build a bridge. (Okay, they also try to drown a dwarf who killed one or two of their soldiers.) But yes: the big thing that shows that they are evil is that they have simple machines, and drive some piles into the riverbed. Also, they (gasp!) build bridges out of wood, which means that they evily and savagely cut down trees. Look, I care about the environment and nature as much as the next guy, but this whole technology is bad garbage wears thin. Also, this then sets up a rehash of Lord of the Rings, complete with the battle being won by ents marching in from the forest and Elrond/Lucy using the Ring of Water to flood out the ford and drown some of the villains. Been there, seen that, it was better in Middle Earth.
Aslan's bizarreness: Apparently, the moral of this movie is: people can't do anything but delay, what you really need is for Aslan/God to act as a deus ex machina to win the day. Which then raises the question of why, as everyone wonders repeatedly, Aslan just hangs out and watches while all of this bad stuff happens without doing anything before the climax of the movie. Yeah, he's ineffable and all that, but at some point you have to wonder whether he just plain doesn't really care, or perhaps is malicious. If the humans saved the day, you could imagine that it was because he cared about free will or something. But they don't. In fact, we are shown that all of their plans besides "let's beg Aslan to help us and try to buy time for him to save the day" fail miserably. So, don't plant a field in the hopes of getting a harvest. Just wait till fall, and pray for Aslan to save you. Also, at the end, Susan and Caspian have this little proto-romance going on. They might want to pursue that--maybe Susan could stay in Narnia a little while. But no-- she must leave. Not because Aslan has a good reason (except maybe that sex is evil, or that Susan is going to hell anyway, so good riddance), but just because he says so. Making teen-age girls cry is fun when you're quasi-omnipotent. To the extent that Aslan is meant to represent God, he makes us question whether God is in fact good-- but there are explanations I can come up with for the problem of evil in the real world. They don't really work in the version in Narnia.
All in all, while there are many little bits that were great, I hated the movie as a whole.
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I was totally expecting to read your comment and chastise you for your whole "the book denied the agency of the lead characters and so I don't like it" thing. That's there, and I still think you need to get over it, but there's much else here as well.
I'm now curious about the timing of the writing of this and The Two Towers. Lewis and Tolkien regularly discussed story ideas with each other.
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It's hard to tell what the timing was. Prince Caspian was published in 1951, a few years before The Two Towers (1954), but of course the Lord of the Rings was developed over an extended period of time before its publication. So it is difficult, without a lot more research, to figure out how the cross-polination of ideas worked. Still, I think that my end conclusion is that the scenes in the movie version of the Lord of the Rings are cooler and work better for me than the similar scenes in the movie version of Prince Caspian. I haven't read the book of Prince Caspian in too long to comment on the written forms, and based on Orichalcum's assessment of the movie's honesty to the book, I don't much want to.
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(How's that for a 'the world has changed' moment? A college professor sixty years ago, couldn't type.)
PC was written in, I think, 1949–1950, so it would have been composed after the main writing of tLorR was done. I expect much of Narnia seems familiar because Lewis and Tolkien were drawing on the same sources rather than explicit contact or pilfering.
As far as the movie goes, I'm not that bothered by the similarities to tLotR. It's only natural. And Peter the Moronic got a raw deal in the movie. He's not nearly so bad in the book. For one thing, the whole castle strike is made up from whole cloth. It's not in the book at all.
In fact, IIRC, the book does better address some of your moral qualms. I don't remember if a battle ever takes place, but if it does, it's entirely through the agency of the Telmarines. Peter's duel is not a delaying tactic, but an attempt to stop the war. If Miraz loses, the Telmarines have no reason to fight, since Caspian is the rightful king. And Miraz loses because he's killed treacherously (as in the movie), but there's no mercy scene. He slips and Lord Sopespian stabs him. Then the battle is about to start but Aslan puts an end to it, with Lucy and Susan's help. So I suppose he's a little more effable in the book, though the theme of needing God's agency is still there.
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Faith, not Works.
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So I'm just getting back from a weekend away, which means I don't have time now to get into a good comment to this post (or all of the other comments I want to make to other posts, either) -
But I'm wildly curious to ask. There's quite a lot about Narnia that I loved at ages 7-8, and quite a lot that I still do love, more perhaps because it touches a warm place in the center of my chest than because Mr. Lewis reflects my own intellectual views. And Reepicheep is indeed one of the things about Narnia that I still love - and I was just wondering, why you thought I would? Because he's a gallant knight with all the mannerisms, or because he sets himself a Grail quest, or because he achieves it? Or because I like Eddie Izzard enough to haul ass to New York to see him? Just wondering. It's always interesting to find out which of your personality traits shine brightest to the people watching.
It's actually Edmund who is my favorite character - in great part because of one line in Horse: "Even a traitor may mend. I have known one that did."
(Although I wanted to be Lucy when I was seven, of course. And the older I get, the more I respect Peter and Tirian for wading right into battles they can't win, because they are battles that must be fought. Say what you want about the ultimate message of Last Battle, and I do have issues with it - Tirian fights a losing battle against evil forces with everything he has and in every way he can. On the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets and on the hills...)
Right, so it is in fact totally impossible for me to not wade into Narnia, even when I really don't have time to do it justice. Argh! Sorry for cluttering your comments with half-formed thoughts! What was it about Reepicheep?
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And didn't everyone want to be Lucy when they were seven?
Edmund has some awesome lines in this movie, I should say, and really comes into his own. And yes - he is always defined as the redeemed traitor, in so many ways. It's easy for Peter to be certain of himself, because Peter the Magnificent was Always Right. Maybe not as compassionate or sympathetic as he might have been, but Always Right.
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