Disney sat [MSN’s Hollywood Hitlist columnist Gregory Ellwood] down with director Andrew Adamson and producer Mark Johnson to watch a good 45 minutes of the upcoming flick. And, not surprisingly, there is a lot about the new movie for audiences to get excited about.
Caspian is pretty cool: It’s hard to introduce a new main character in the second installment of a franchise, but Adamson may have pulled it off with Caspian. The movie begins with the prince’s life on the line after the birth of a younger male cousin. Caspian’s evil uncle is king, and with the new heir his dashing nephew is expendable. The chase scene that follows is far more dramatic than most of “Wardrobe” and makes Caspian immediately sympathetic. The fact that newcomer Ben Barnes has some genuine charisma doesn’t hurt either.
No surprise, this is the last of Peter and Susan: One dramatic plotline Adamson has played up is the tension between Peter, the oldest of the children, and Caspian. Peter hasn’t adjusted to living back in the real world after ruling a kingdom and is eager to prove he’s the rightful ruler of the land. This could come across a little too heavy-handedly, but in the scenes I previewed it seemed subtler than most moviegoers would expect. Adamson says it all ties into why Peter and Susan realize this will be their last visit to Narnia. Edmund and Lucy return in the next film, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.”
New influences for classic enemies: C.S. Lewis conceived the Telmarines as the descendants of pirates, but Adamson has taken it a step further by clearly portraying them with Spanish influences. He says he was looking to differentiate them from the British characteristics of the Pevensie children, but it was a little too obvious for this columnist.
Hardcore fans are a tough crowd: Adamson has had to change a number of things from the original book, including certain plot points, in order to make the story more cinematic, and he expects to hear grumbles from some of the hard-core fans. “There [are] always fanatics who will have that response,” Adamson says. “How true to the book does the movie have to be? I think for me it’s finding the key points, the key individual characters and the key themes and staying true to those.”