Prince Caspian: Non-Spoilery Review - Warning: Comments now contain Big Huge spoilers!

[orichalcum]

Haiku 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 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.

Comments

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

Huh, faith to the plot is not what I would have expected from the previews...

Er, um, also, isn't "torch" British for "flashlight?"

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Sounds like fun! I presume I will enjoy it, since I do not have the cerebralpaladin brain. (I feel bad for you sometimes, CP, cuz there are movies I really wish your brain would let you enjoy more, but then, my brain does the same thing, just on other issues. What can we do? Brains are like that.)

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.

[meepodeekin.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I saw the preview before Iron Man and I was thinking that it looked a lot more interesting than the The Lion... movie had. Caspian was my favorite Narnia book as a child. However, I was the little Jewish girl who adored them until she got to The Last Battle, finally "got" the Jesus thing, got pissed off, and never looked at any of them again. So, what do you think? Is there a chance I'll like the movie? I do fear that, as digitalemur so delicately put it, I have a bit of the "CP brain."

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that movie just didn't work for me. There were some really wonderful bits, surrounded by an hour and a half of lame. I would really sum up my objections as: the movie relied on the stupidity of the main protagonists to motivate the plot; the morality of the movie was deeply disturbing; I'm sick and tired of British pastoralism/anti-industrialization/I already saw this movie, and LotR was better; and Aslan is ineffable to the point where I really wonder if he is in fact evil.

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...

[hca.livejournal.com]

Heya -

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?