Prince Caspian

Well, one of us had to see it and take one for the team. This just happened to be my turn.

Being in no way a fan of the first Narnia movie, I'm not sure what possessed me to give this one a try. I think I was hoping the movie would focus more on Prince Caspian and that he'd be a more interesting character than the four annoying children. I also vaguely remembered that Prince Caspian sails this high seas quite a bit, so I thought that might be cool to see.

Well, no luck. No sailing or ocean scenes in this movie. The closest we get is a few moments of the children playing in the ocean when they're first transported back to Narnia. I happened to recognize this place as actually being Cathedral Cove, an amazing place on the Coromandel Peninsula in New Zealand. I haven't been there, but I definitely heard about how amazing it is from my time traveling in New Zealand. It was pretty exciting to actually recognize a film location in real life.



At any rate, I was able to pinpoint a bit more about why the Narnia movies fail so completely. My latest theory is that the main four children really have no camaraderie. They are constantly saying to each other "I told you so" or "See, you're an idiot" or "Why should I trust you?" or "I'm going my own way, see you later." At no point do we get the sense that they care for or support each other. It made me realize that, in Harry Potter movies, even when Ron and Hermione are fighting, there's still a deeper feeling of connection and love beneath it and you know those characters would do anything for each other in heartbeat. That's what makes the Narnia movies so hard to get into, if the main siblings don't trust each other, why should you, as the audience, trust them?

It doesn't help matters that their acting is rather weak as well. Especially the youngest girl- blech.

Another thing that ruined Prince Caspian would have to be the accent of the title character. It's a mix between a Russian spy and Inigo Montoya ("you killed my father, prepare to die"), and it's by far the most distracting thing of this whole film. I couldn't help remembering the story about how Mike Myers filmed all of Shrek is a normal voice and then they went back and redid it with a Scottish accent. I spent most of this movie trying to imagine what it would be like if Prince Caspian had a Scottish accent, and decided it would have been vastly improved.

The one scene that was decent in this film involved a surprise attack of a castle by griffins air-lifting Narnians onto the towers. The camera angles really worked in this scene and it really felt like you were flying in as well. It was exciting and interesting. Otherwise, the rest of the movie was pretty mediocre. The CG mouse was way too similar to Shrek 2's Puss in Boots. I won't even bother ripping on the rest of the CG animals.

Anyway, skip it. And let's stop seeing Narnia movies from now on.