THE first time I tried to read The Chronicles of Narnia from start to finish, I gave up somewhere in the middle third of Prince Caspian-after the long flashback to the prince’s childhood in his usurping uncle’s court, but before the Pevensie children finished wandering (and wandering, and wandering) in circles through the Narnian woods. This was a temporary setback to my Narniaphilia, and many re-readings later I can testify that Caspian has more virtues than I apprehended at the age of seven. But even now it remains my least favorite volume in C. S. Lewis’s saga, which in turn made it the Chronicles book that I was the most sanguine about seeing released to the tender mercies of the Hollywood blockbuster machine.
The good news is that the machineembodied in this case by Andrew Adamson, who’s done better by Narnia than his past association with the execrable Shrek franchise had led me to expect-has made something entertaining out of it. The bad news is that the result bears only a superficial resemblance to the sort of stories Lewis told. Prince Caspian is an epic fantasy rather than an intimate one-clanking rather than charming, martial rather than theological, and designed for teenagers (the core of the ticket-buying public, after all) instead of the children Lewis wrote for. In certain respects it’s a better film than the more faithful adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe a few years back. But it’s a strikingly less Narnian film, sacrificing the particularities of the book that it’s adapting to create a considerably more generic entertainment.
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