The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN (2008) - May 26, 2008
Well, that was a bit of a let-down. After the first film, which was such an enjoyable adaptation, my expectations for this were pretty high. But while the first film was reasonably faithful to its book, this one makes a lot of needless changes which really don't make much sense. The film alters the sequence of many of the events from the book, which I can understand for the most part, but it also adds a lot of superfluous stuff, such as political intrigue with the villain (presumably in an effort to make him a more fleshed out character, but it's completely unnecessary). There's also a long battle which comes midway through the movie which only serves to add to its long running time (and in fact as the fight went on, I was starting to think that it was actually the final battle, and that the film was going to end sooner than I thought, which obviously turned out to be far from the truth). There were still a lot of good things in the film -- it was well directed and the performances were all very good (with the possible exception of Ben Barnes, who is essentially good as Caspian, though he seems to be basing his Spanish accent on Ricky Ricardo). But the film dragged quite a bit, particularly in the middle, and lacked much of the sense of wonder from the first one. **1/2