Review: Prince Caspian
I saw The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian Friday night.
First of all, let me say that this was as good as or better than the first Chronicles of Narnia movie. Also, I read the books when I was a kid, but I haven’t read them again since. I do remember some of the books, but, most importantly, I recall that I enjoyed the books quite a bit at the time.
This movie was about the four “Sons and Daughters of Adam” of legend, and from the first movie, coming back to find a very different Narnia than they left. Naturally, as we found out in the first movie, time moves quite a bit differently in Narnia than it does in our world, so when Lucy and Susan and Edmund and Peter go back, they’ve become ancient history. The kingdom they built with Aslan has fallen to a foreign invader. They’ve ruled for more than ten generations, driving the Narnians into hiding, after trying to kill all the former subjects of Narnia, that is. So, as you can see, there may be a bit of tension between these two factions. Now, picture if you will, a prince who’s been taught all the old stories and has a very different view of his people’s ancient enemy. And, there, in a nutshell, is the central conflict of the movie. Prince Caspian fighting his own people to bring about an age of peace and prosperity between traditional enemies.
Now, as I generally do on this blog, to keep from ruining the movie for you, I’ll stop here lest I accidentally fire off a spoiler. I will say this, though, the movie was great. Also, to a Christian and a writer, there were quite a few very obvious references to not only the Bible but many ideas central to Christian theology. The idea that we must come to God through faith and that He cannot be truly proven or disproven, but can only be found via faith, for instance. And, that God’s way may not be the most obvious way or even the simplest, most straight-forward way to do things. And, of course, all the images that are echoes of Biblical stories and images which run through the movie are far too numerous for me to count. But, I don’t think that a non-Christian would be put off by any of this, as it’s presented in such a non-intrusive way that they’d probably never even notice.
All in all, this was a great movie, with a good plot and excellent production values. Well worth seeing and, even seeing again.
