By: Michael Jewell
“The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” is the first of this summer’s epic fantasy blockbusters, one of many soon-to-be-budget busters in which I revisit the cherished books of my childhood, scratch my head and say, “wait … what?” Peter Jackson instantly canonized the style with his sprawling adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and few formulas have been followed more rigidly by bleary-eyed directors since. In a way, the Weta Workshop wizard rejuvenated the genre with his loving attention to detail, respect for source material and the mind-bending scope of his special effects. But as a new decade draws near, his kiwi-style epic may have been a one-man revolution. Repeated DVD viewings lose the original luster of the theatrical experience, and no other filmmaker has been able to capture the spirit of ‘Rings.’ ‘Caspian,’ Disney’s newest installment of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” penned by Tolkien’s longtime friend C.S. Lewis, encapsulates everything wrong with the burgeoning genre.
‘Caspian’ follows the eponymous Prince of a swarthy kingdom forced to flee his home and lead a revolution of exiled magical creatures against his evil uncle. The Lewis of my childhood excelled in the detailed, painting a gorgeous Teutonic mythology that coexists with thinly-veiled Christian symbolism. He loses his stride in his plotting, where he is prone to dim-witted Anglican moralizing, and ‘Caspian’ represents his weakest work, an endorsement of holy warfare against atheists covered in the gossamer veneer of a children’s fairy tale. Fortunately, as a kid, I missed many of the symbolic elements in my revelry of his rich fantasy environment.
Walden Media is a company with Evangelical Christian ties, and this element is the film’s most controversial. Whichever religion the film endorses, it is the simple-minded moralizing and cavalier violence that is cause for alarm. ‘Caspian’ is hyper-violent and conspicuously bloodless, with a severed head leaving a sword shiny and clean as a new dime. The film’s plot simply hinges on two massive, consecutive battle scenes. Hollywood be damned, this level of consequence-free violence in a kids movie is skin-crawlingly creepy.
The film is shot mostly in parts of Eastern Europe most reminiscent of Jackson’s New Zealand, a now painfully-familiar IMAX-friendly landscape whose beauty is dulled with repeated viewing. The new school of fantasy requires lots of lush, full frames and a relaxed pace to allow the viewer to drink in the shot, but in films lacking the scope of Jackson’s ‘Rings,’ this renders the pace dull, plodding and terribly pageant-like. When the swords aren’t flying, the dialogue is flopping, especially in the film’s intolerably slow dénouement, a fantasy requirement that ties up loose ends left after a final apocalyptic conflict. The scale of any fantasy movie today almost requires 20 minutes of awkward wrapping up.
At this point, the new fantasy genre needs its own “Blade Runner,” a film that rips the innards out of its formula and ends without sentimentality. With fantasy flicks making bank at the box office, and no catalyst for change, that film may be a long time coming.
