Fantasy fans who felt the void created by the wrap-up of the Lord of the Rings flicks in 2003 could take comfort in the identical elements -- magical creatures, large-scale battles, simplistic delineation of good versus evil -- that were on display in 2005’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
With that film proving to be almost as potent at the box office as the LOTR trilogy, we now get The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, which turns out to be that rare sequel which improves upon the original. Prince Caspian is decidedly a darker picture than its predecessor, which seems to be the path taken by many second installments in film franchises (The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Back to the Future Part II, The Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation). In this one, the four Pevensie kids -- Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) -- find themselves at a London subway station one minute and back in the magical land of Narnia the next. But this isn’t the lovely, bright Narnia they left behind; now 1,300 years later (in Narnian time, of course), they’ve returned to find a gloomy environment in which humans (the Telmarine race) have taken over and all mystical creatures are believed to be extinct. One of the Telmarines, the dashing Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes), is the rightful heir to the throne, but after an assassination attempt by his uncle (Sergio Castellitto), he elects to hightail it to the woods, where he discovers that talking animals and other enchanted Narnia denizens still exist after all. Eventually, the prince, the woodland inhabitants and the Pevensie siblings band forces to restore Narnia to its previous glory. A couple of familiar faces from the previous picture return in small roles, yet it’s cast newcomer Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent) who walks away with this film; he’s excellent as Trumpkin, a surly dwarf who slowly warms up to the four children who invade his territory. As for the kids, this is clearly a case where girls rule, boys drool. Susan cuts a fierce figure as a warrior queen, while Lucy is allowed to establish the strongest bonds with the Narnians. On the other hand, the interesting Edmund is given too little to do, while Peter is only slightly less generic than fellow pretty-boy Caspian.
