While The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe culminated with a grand coronation scene, Andrew Adamson’s second Narnia film, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, never gets around to officially making the young prince into a king. Nor did Lewis’s original. And this is as it should be since this second adventure is about people who are more like us and about life in a world which is more like our own.
When a movie is made from a beloved children’s classic, reviews often end up being little more than a list of what was left out, added, or changed. In the case of a film series, another kind of comparison is also common. Here the reviewer provides a list of favorite elements from the first movie which are then measured against their presence or absence in the second. About a minute into watching the most recent Narnia movie, neither of these two kinds of lists seemed very important to me. Andrew Adamson’s Prince Caspian is a captivating work. And once it starts, the viewer is caught up in the same kind of storytelling wizardry that was so abundant in C. S. Lewis’s original.
Some film critics have complained that King Miraz is less interesting than the White Witch and Narnia is altogether less enchanting. Both claims are true, and both changes were intentional on Lewis’s part.