I begin with an important idea: movies aren’t books and should never be judged so. If we judge movies as if they are books, they will always seem inferior. Books can do things movies will never be able to do; however, the reverse is equally true. Films have their own superiorities which cannot be ignored.

Faithful Adaptation

            That said, in the film category we call “adaptation,” there is an intimate connection between books and movies. A movie adaptation must still be judged as a movie, but it is also judged for its attempt to adapt a book to the screen. To this end we talk about whether or not an adaptation is “faithful.” Faithfulness acknowledges that books and movies are not the same thing but that a movie has succeeded in being like the book it adapts in plot and/or “spirit.”¹

            In adaptation, there are certainly times to diverge from a book, and the spirit or tone of a book can be kept even with additions and subtractions. Still there are movie adaptations which cause readers to wince. I think, for example, of the movie Troy which kills off Menolaus, one of the few survivors of the Trojan war! The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe movie was a faithful, if not perfect, adaptation of Lewis’s book. Prince Caspian is not.

Failure and Success?

           Nevertheless, Caspian presents me with a dilemma: I liked Adamson’s movie; it just isn’t Lewis’s book. A good movie and a bad adaptation—what exactly do I do with that? I decided I needed a new word for Adamson’s Prince Caspian—one that allows me enjoy the film as a film and reject it as an adaptation. My friend Kyle suggested the word “resemblance,” and I went with it, suggesting to myself that a “failure” is a movie which claims to be an adaptation but isn’t and ruins our viewing experience, a “resemblance,” is an attempted adaptation which takes too many liberties with the original but doesn’t completely ruin our viewing experience, and an “adaptation” is a movie faithful to the plot and/or spirit of the original book with the understanding that movies must adapt books into filmic conventions and aesthetics. Andrew Adamson’s Prince Caspian is not a successful adaptation, but it’s an entertaining movie. So I’ll call it a “resemblance,” thus allowing myself to both enjoy and criticize it.

What I Enjoyed and What I Regret

            I loved the quick start to the action in Narnia—the attempt on Caspian’s life while he looks on. I loved the introduction of Reepicheep—the unseen creature moving with menacing speed through the undergrowth. I loved the choreography for the fight sequences, especially Peter’s fight with Miraz and the fighting of the dwarfs. Setting, scenery, and costumes were wonderful. I liked how Lucy discovered the path Aslan wanted her to follow by falling through to it. I liked the humor, especially when it involved Reepicheep. And those double armed Telmarine catapults were, in this reviewer’s opinion, freakin’ awesome!

            I didn’t mind the kiss between Caspian and Susan, but it was certainly “Hollywoodish” and unnecessary. I liked the addition of a conflict for Peter: what would it be like to grow and be a king and then have to go back to being a boy in school? But accomplishing that addition drew the story too far from the original novel.

            The scene involving the restoration of Reepicheep’s tail was stilted by stuttering non-Lewis dialog—hacked to pieces by the writers. Indeed, all Adamson’s Aslan seemed to be able to do was growl and repeat that “nothing happens the same way twice” (which he said the same way twice). There were too few trees in the fight—their appearance a token of what the book describes. Additionally, there are two major failures in the film.

            The reawakening of Narnia which makes up so much of the novel’s beauty was completely absent in the film. A bigger blunder was reducing the importance of Aslan. To claim to be an adaptation and yet leave the lion an almost unnecessary character in the story goes too far. Aslan’s primary role in the film was to growl loudly. He said little, and his best words were removed. It is the movie’s greatest failure.

            Prince Caspian is an entertaining movie and a bad adaptation. So I will think of it as a “resemblance.” That way I can still find something in it to enjoy. That solves it for me, but for you I need to add one note: read the Prince Caspian book to your kids and grandkids—they need to get what the movie missed.

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¹ By “spirit” we tend to mean an overarching thematic center or a quality of tone.(back to text)