Fantastic to be pulled out your seat and transported to another era and see a bunch of little boys and girls taking on an entire army of men with some help from sword-wielding mice, badgers, centaurs, a master magician, and other imaginary creatures, in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.
Running for his life, the prince (Ben Barnes) blows his magic horn. Its reverberation is felt by a group of present-day British school kids: the Pevensie siblings, Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes), and Lucy (Georgie Henley). They immediately travel back in time. And discover their old selves, and costumes, and realize that since their one-year stay in London, hundreds of years have passed by in the land of Narnia.
Why this heir apparent had to be woken up in the middle of the night and asked to instantly flee, though, is beyond me. For, his pregnant aunt who gives birth to a boy certainly had a healthy fifty-fifty chance of getting it right. One would have expected a fair amount of planning instead of this last minute rush.
Metal bangs against metal sans tactics, sans technique, in the one-to-one swordfights. Heavily armored from top to toe, it’s unbelievable that a boy could lift a heavy sword with one hand, leave alone dancing around with it and swishing and swooshing it madly in the air. And here’s something rudimentary that their sword masters forgot to teach them: When a swordsman lashes at your feet, children, don’t just hop mildly above the ground, lazily. You’re supposed to leap into the air like a frog.
It’s scary too to watch these young city kids riding horses. Good they didn’t fall off. No cycle balance at all.
The cameras sweep across beautiful landscapes offering spectacular, exhilarating views. On an occasion, it suddenly plunges down a steep cliff, and takes you along with it. Along with the CGI characters fighting with and against real actors on a huge canvas, trees shake the earth from under their roots, and the crystal clear water of a stream realistically rises to a great height and takes a human shape, while the actors are being whirled around.
Andrew Adamson’s sword-and-sorcery fairy tale promises right from the start to be an entertainer. For a change, surprisingly, one of the most clichéd visuals in a fantasy film is missing: that of child passengers precariously balancing on their pet and soaring through the seas/heavens.
