Ben Barnes, a young British stage actor, is perfectly wooden as Caspian, though more than suitable as an object of a high school crush by Susan Pevensie. Skandar Keynes, as Edmund, the most stroppy of the Pevensie children, shows some development from The Lion, but the show on the Narnian side is completely stolen by Peter Dinklage, who plays the cynical dwarf Trumpkin. The fact that the accent of the curmudgeonly but good-hearted Trumpkin is clearly from the north of England, and much of the Narnian army sound like they are from the British Midlands, while the Telmarines have accents that are clearly southern or eastern European in inspiration, gives rise to some interesting reflections on the pertinacity of ethnocentric stereotyping in fantasy fiction.
As with The Lion, Prince Caspian is not a bad film. For those who know the books, it is in fact a remarkable feat of fidelity to the original work — for better or for worse. The Narnian series of books is, for all its talking beasts and knights in shining armor, a story about finding redemption in the love of a Christian god. Adamson, to his credit, has not discarded this aspect of the story totally, but in an age when the moral certitudes that Lewis lived with have long been thrown out the window, he fails in this interpretation to engage with the core of the story, and is content to remain faithful to the superficial details.
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