It’s next to impossible to watch the trailers for Prince Caspian without thinking of Middle-Earth and wishing J. R. R. Tolkien had prolonged the magic by padding The Lord of the Rings into a lifelong seventy-volume series.

(Or maybe that’s just the executives at New Line Cinema.) Careful examination of Andrew Adamson’s new Narnia adaptation will reveal there’s more to the movie than just hacking and slashing; the hard part is seeing past all that.

Barely a year has passed for Team Pevensie, but all four children (noticeably not hobbits!) remain affected by their previous lives as kings and queens of Narnia (surely distant and separate from Gondor). Wide-eyed Lucy has learned not to bawl at every little inconvenience. Edmund has channeled his formerly bratty ways into a more refined, scene-stealing form of sarcasm. Susan has learned that boys exist, though she seems to lament living in a world where she’s forbidden from keeping them at bay with arrows (particularly one gangly suitor who appears to be Justin Long by way of Wesley Wyndham-Price — little does he know he’s leering at royalty).

Peter, more than any of his siblings, chafes at the confines of Earth-bound school-going reality. He lived a full lifetime as High King of Narnia, only to relinquish it and return to his teenage years. Facing the prospect of reliving those awkward years from scratch without benefit of armor doesn’t sit well with him at all. C. S. Lewis’ original novels bypass the logical ramifications of that necessary plot device (”We used to rule our own country, but now we don’t, tra la la, what’s on the radio tonight?”), but as played by William Moseley, Peter snarls and strains as an abdicated ruler trapped in the mundane and yearning to use his now-wasted ruling-class skills for a greater good.

As with the book, we receive only nominal moments to meet Our Heroes before a magic invisible hurricane razes Platform 9¾ and replaces it right beneath their motionless feet with pastoral New Zealand. They waste no time finding all their royal possessions stored in shiny trunks beneath the ruins of Cair Paravel, where they’ve been safe from harm, theft, weather, aging, animals, and Antique Roadshow scavengers. Not until they rescue an exposition-stuffed dwarf from certain death do they learn of an unexplained time paradox that allowed thirteen Narnian centuries to pass by in the space of a single Earth year. Entire generations were born and passed away in the time it took them to treat their pimples at night.

Funny thing about Narnia: the ruling family’s walkout left a gaping power vacuum all too gleefully filled by the Telmarines, a civilization of human pirates. In any other film this would be an instant happy ending, but here the pirates are too evil to cheer on. We know this because they wear all-black armor instead of Elizabethan party costumes, not to mention they’re aggressively intolerant toward nonhuman rights. Their leader, Miraz, is the obvious tyrant of choice because, just like Serj Tankian, his malevolence manifests in the form of a devilish, protuberant beard that could put your eye out. He aspires to be King Leonidas with the volume turned down to 8, but in his big coronation scene he looks like a very angry Burger King. When this man asks you if you want fries with your Whopper, you say YES.

Among the Telmarines is a lone, innocent holdout: Miraz’s nephew, Caspian the Tenth, son of the deposed goodly pirate king and rightful heir to the pirate throne. His wizened tutor (who’s totally different from Gandalf because he’s chubbier and never once rides a horse) has spent years secretly schooling him in The Way Things Should Be, then intervenes to save his life when Miraz’s men attempt to assassinate him so that his baby cousin might inherit the throne immediately after his first full night’s sleep. That seems to be Miraz’s bright idea, anyway. I can’t imagine another reason why Miraz required that his son’s birth be a certified success before ordering the hit on Caspian. Perhaps the British royalty progression works on similar non-Euclidean principles.

Caspian and the Pevensies (which would make a great name for a band) are quickly directed to their mandatory awkward Marvel Team-Up moment, in which they meet, fight, resolve their differences through forced conversation through gritted teeth, and agree to team up. Not everything goes smoothly, though — Caspian’s actions are brash and untrained, befitting one who would be in command but has never had to take the reins. Peter, on the other hand, has “High King” on his resume and a lifetime of actual military and government experience…but his longtime separation from the patron lion Aslan has led him to embrace blindered self-reliance.

Despite that petty king-of-the-hill struggle, our united front (don’t call them a fellowship!) must face Miraz’s forces and contend with what unread Narnia newcomers must by now assume is the overarching grand theme of the series: bombastic medieval warfare. It’s been years since I experienced the novel, but the film version gives the impression that, out of the 256 pages of one version Amazon is currently selling, about 350 of those are battle scenes.

Other than a few token commanders who communicate even the most dastardly orders solely in grunts and knowing gestures, the bulk of the opponents are a limitless supply of human CG clones wearing metallic Tragedy masks and towing behind them several gargantuan catapults powered by perpetual motion machines, able to reload as fast as a shotgun and possessing an equally limitless supply of multi-ton boulder ammo. Never mind where all those dozens of boulders are stored — perhaps a handy pocket dimension similar to the one contained within Santa’s gift bag.

Even in the midst of battle, you can tell which side is good because they have all the best character actors. Peter Dinklage, possible the most talented undertall dramatic alive (The Station Agent, Elf, TV’s Threshold) has the honor of playing Trumpkin (no relation to Thorin!), the dwarf with a heart of equal parts gold and funny. Warwick Davis, a comparative elder statesman, is Nikabrik, the other dwarf who hangs out with the side of good when it suits him, but has no vested interest in a shiny happy Narnia. Carrying the movie whenever it can is the voice of Eddie Izzard as Reepicheep, the feisty yet deadly head swordsman of the Mouse Guard.

There’s a jarring yet effective digression into temptation involving a traitor, an old acquaintance of Our Heroes, and two bizarre sorcerors arriving from the left field of Dr. Moreau. There’s a duel of honor between single envoys from each side that’s not exactly a graceful dance between two expert fencers, but it’s far more convincing in its grittiness than any and every fight scene in the first film. And then there’s the entire last third of the movie, essentially Our Army at War, backed into a corner against a damaged castle (totally not Helm’s Deep! Different, er, color scheme) but ably abetted by the forces of Greco-Roman mythology (obviously a vital component to Christian allegory in ways that will come to me any minute now), including the nimblest animation ever employed on satyrs and centaurs who leap into battle with an alarming gusto. Also on loan are giant eagles that save the day at the least expected moments, whose resemblance to any other surprise giant eagles living or dead or celluloid is no doubt coincidental.

The introduction of the Telmarines is unengaging. The ending is inevitable from the first reel (there may or may not be a lion involved, and there may or may not be a man who would or would not be a King who might or might not consider a sort of Return). Caspian himself barely seems prepared for squirehood, let alone governance. The little things may come back to haunt you, as with Susan’s quiver that’s always filled with a random number of arrows (anywhere between four and eight, sometimes within the same scene), or with Lucy’s magic resurrection liqeuer that she only shares with the most important characters (and whose bottle seems to be fuller than it was in the first film — thank Aslan for free refills).

Beyond those areas of weakness, on a base level the film is a competent action fantasy yarn with underlying themes of faith, humility, animal rights, and the importance of using implied hideous war violence to obtain a family-friendly rating. For more experienced viewers, the overlying theme of self-invited LOTR comparisons will likely muddle the experience. Lucy is advised more than once, “Not everything happens the same way twice.” Judging by the separated-at-birth? evidence, the filmmakers seem to be hoping otherwise.

(Be sure to check out our Fantasy Forum discussion for more opinions, or offer us your own counterpoint!)

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