Musings of a Virgin

Ahhh another installment of the Chronicles Of Narnia. If you didn't know it by now, the film is based on the books by C S Lewis, and this is book 2 of 7. However, Disney who holds the rights to the series will only be making one more film based on the series and unless both do exceptionally well, we can forget about anymore films based on the books.

I liked the first movie, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Note that I said liked, not loved. A main problem with trying to make the books into an epic fantasy is that it wasn't written to be epic. If you read the books, it was obviously written for children and in many cases lacking the epic battles scenes or deep emotions that books like Lord of the Rings series had.

Earlier this week, I got the audio version of Prince Caspian from www.audible.com and the whole book was read in about 4 1/2 hours. That should give you an idea of how long the original book was. When I watched the movie, there were some significant changes made to the books, however it was done in the spirit of the books and in my opinion, made the movie much better. I loved the changes, the screenwriters for this show should definitely be given an award. They turned a children's fantasy story into an epic fantasy movie with emotions.

I won't go into detail on all the changes, but making Prince Caspian a major character and older as well as the rivalry between him and High King Peter was a stroke of genius.

Overall I say that this 2nd installment outshined the first movie. In part because we now have a history with the 4 children who have grown and are definitely show their movie chops. Much the same way that the kids in Harry Potter have developed in the later films.

Oh and of course the special effects were top notch. But isn't that mostly a given these days?

I strongly recommend this movie if you liked the first one and if you were so so on the first movie, then this is definitely better. If you've never seen the first movie, the skip this one, there's too much reference to past events to would simply not make sense to you.

I rate The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian a 4.5/5.

Interesting note: Ben Barnes (See the pic above) who plays Price Caspian speaks with a Spanish accent in the show but he's 100% British.

Also, I prefer the movie poster below with the 4 kids, instead of the one being shown everywhere with only Caspian in it.

Labels: Movies

Posted by emyln on Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 9:43 AM | Permalink