Film Review: Narnia under siege

The Harry Potter series of books had the inestimable advantage of being an enormously popular contemporary composition, while J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings had the almost equivalent advantage of being a work of genius that had half a century to establish its fan base. The Chronicles of Narnia has neither of these advantages, and the fact that the books have dated significantly over the 60 or so years since they were first published, and are marred, by the standards of popular culture at least, by their overt Christian message, was made clear by the first installment of the series, the 2005 film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Despite this, the first installment gained sufficient popularity to warrant the continuation of the series under director Andrew Adamson, who made his name with the Shrek franchise. This is a mixed blessing for fans of the book, for while director Adamson shows a commendable faithfulness to the spirit of the books and a dexterous soft peddling of C.S. Lewis’ more blatant sermonizing, the result, manages to fall curiously flat — caught between a straightforward morality tale and the desire to produce the adrenaline rush that is essential to any movie that relies primarily on spectacle to draw in the audience.

Adamson has clearly decided to emphasize the darker aspects of the story, and Prince Caspian aims for a toughness that the first installment never aspired to. With the very first scene, a cry of pain as a woman gives birth in a darkened chamber, Adamson announces that he is taking the series to a new level. The promise, unfortunately, remains sadly unfulfilled, despite two big and really rather exciting battle sequences, and some outstanding acting by minor characters.

As the film opens, the land of Narnia is under the iron heel of the Telmarines. Inside the court of its rulers, a child is born to the usurper King Miraz, and the rightful heir to the throne, Prince Caspian, is forced to flee. He escapes into the hands of the Narnian people, dwarves and talking badgers among a host of other magical animals, who have been oppressed virtually out of existence. For reasons that are not ever made clear, he is regarded as the rightful king by the oppressed people of the land, despite his ethnic affiliation with the oppressors. This is only one of many issues in this complex web of religious and nationalistic allegories that are rather brushed over so that we can get to the fight sequences with the minotaurs and sword-wielding mice.

Meanwhile, the four Pevensie children are caught up in wartime London, missing the wondrous life they’d lived as kings and queens in Narnia in the first installment. The life of school children grates on them, and Peter and Edmund get into fights with other school kids as their sisters look on in despair. They know that beneath the dull exterior of their school uniforms, they are royalty. But even as the drab world of boarding school life closes in, a call is sent out, and miraculously they are drawn back to help Caspian liberate Narnia and its freedom-loving people from the Telmarine yoke.

Lewis was a subtle storyteller and packed a good deal of moral reflection into this Narnia series. Morality is at the very core of the stories, and Adamson tries his best to put a contemporary gloss on this, sometimes with considerable effect. A scene in which Narnian troops, including gorgeously rendered centaurs, are caught behind enemy lines and massacred, is heartbreaking; but the recrimination back at camp between Peter Pevensie, erstwhile high king, and Prince Caspian, the supposedly legitimate heir to the throne, is of an adolescent shallowness that would embarrass a child of 12.