Prince Caspian: the film

[annwfyn]

Good

• Reepicheep. Perfect. Just perfect Eddie Izzard is a god, and I made little 'squee' noises every time he appeared on screen.



• Some of the imagery - the CGI was great, the landscape was amazing. It looked like Narnia to me.



• Edmund. Totally Edmund. I don't care if he's fifteen. I wants him for my very own and he made me want to write lots and lots of fanfic with Mary Sue girls in it who get to love him and hug him for evermore.



• Lucy. She's exactly as I think CS Lewis would want her to be.



• Susan. She's not how she was written but damnit she was cool. She just rocked my world.



• Trumpkin. He was visually perfect, and really well written.



• The final fight scene in which Miraz goes down. It was a pretty good transposition from the book.



• Contraversially, I really liked the Caspian/Susan love story. It was sweet, understated, and makd me get a bit misty eyed. But then I'm a sucker for a doomed romance. On so many many many levels.

Bad

• The entire Peter hubris plot. It was not in the book, was really clumsily done and felt incredibly out of character. Peter isn't an obnoxious wanker. He's frickin' King Arthur. He's Narnia's golden boy. He doesn't slaughter half his men because he's too egotistical to back down.



• The really bad swordplay. The guy who plays Peter can't fight. That makes the sword scenes NOT GOOD.



• The heavy handed Christianity. It was worse than the book, and the theology that they were hitting you over the head with wasn't very CS Lewis. I've read CS Lewis theology. And his version of Christianity didn't say "you shouldn't try and sort it out yourself, you should sit down and ask Jesus for help. And if you don't, then you're a wanker and all your men will die.
  
  CS Lewis was CofE, with some Catholic sympathies. He wasn't about 'through faith alone'. He was a proponent of muscular Christianity, was very keen on Doing Stuff, and in the Last Battle made it pretty damn clear that in his theological world it is your actions which define you. So, where this whole 'you've got to ask Aslan for help'.
  
  And frankly, if I find the Christian propaganda overbearing then there is something wrong.