Have been to see Prince Caspian and thought it an excellent meditation on the difficulties and dangers of belief.
The film sees the characters move beyond the separation into camps of the good and bad towards which the allegorical structure of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe leads its characters.
Prince Caspian sees its characters struggling with the nature of belief and destiny, making mistakes but finding strength in adversity. Those who act heroically are often those who are small and ordinary while even enemies are shown to be human and facing their own inner conflicts.
The storytelling is tight and the additions to the book add both to the action and character development. Once again, director Andrew Adamson’s evocation of Narnia is full and compelling but also laced with a mordant humour that brings a down-to-earth realism to this tale of heroism and fantasy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Regina Spektor - The Call.
3 comments:
I too went to see this with my kids on Saturday. And I know that I have promised various people to write up an analysis, so shall have to go again shortly with my notebook.
I think - first impressions - that it is a timely film, in that it talks about what happens when a barbaric and arrogant culture is swept aside by the revival of faith and mutuality - a scenario for our real world, I sense, for the years to come. Yet, the film adaptation, here, severely emasculates the book by Lewis in a number of ways. The sequence of the revival (revivification?) of the trees is accompanied, in the novel, with a pageant featuring Bacchus and Silenus - this is significant by its absence in the film, for example, which manages to be much less 'plural' and cross-cultural than its progenitor-text...
As I say, I shall need to write this up properly!...
Malcolm Doney explores aspects of Lewis' inclusion of characters drawn from pagan mythology in his interview with Douglas Gresham in the Church Times. In response, Gresham flags up Lewis' positive understanding of 'pagans' in the sense used in Romans 1. 18-20 and talks about Lewis' attempt to "put the mythological characters and creatures in their right places, all under God's command."
As you suggest, some of this may have been lost in the film. I think this simply reflects the demands of re-telling the story in a way that works onscreen and that, in this, the film-makers have learnt from 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardbrobe' which, because it followed the story so faithfully (with only minor additions/amendments), had less of a sense of dramatic intensity than the current film.
Having said that you still have the river-god, the dryads and the trees all featurin prominantly (along with a whole host of mythological creatures among the Narnians). Philip Ritchie made the point in his post on the film that the river suddenly flooding to wash away enemies and the trees 'waking up' and joining in the fight are almost identical to scenes in Lord of the Rings. One interesting aspect of this comparison is the extent to which Lewis and the film retain the pagan mythology of these events whereas Tolkien integrates these events into his own mythology and doesn't leave the sense of their original source in the way that Lewis does.
So I think that enough of that plurality is retained in terms of inclusion of mythological characters and imagery but also,and perhaps more importantly, in the film's refusal to paint the conflict in simplistic terms of good and evil. I thought the internal conflicts of the Telemarines one of the strongest aspect of the film and was uplifted by an ending that saw enemies treated with humanity, some choosing a new life in our own world and others remaining as part of the plurality that is Narnia.
To follow up on Jonathan's comment, I agree that there is more plurality than at first appears. I think this is true not just in the complexity of the conflicts, both in the Telemarine and Narnian camps, but in the very strong casting and performance of the characters. For example, I actually cared about the Telemarines and was interested in the choices they made. These included Miraz, Queen Prunaprismia, General Glozelle and the Lords. I contrast this with The Lord of The Rings where there were few sympathetic portrayals of 'the enemy' and one cared little about what happened to them.
Post a Comment