Of course, there will be spoilers... You have been warned! But I seriously doubt that anyone who's old enough to read this blog could have gotten through life without hearing the plot of most of these books anyway... And if you are, by chance, someone who has never read the Chronicles of Narnia? Shame on you!

Let me say right now, before I get into anything else, that you should stop what you're doing and go see this movie right now, and no excuses. I know there's going to be some people out there who are going to balk at the idea of watching a movie steeped with religious overtones, but, Christian doctrine aside, it's a good family-friendly fantasy movie that needs support to encourage more movies like it! Plus, we all want to see if they can get past The Silver Chair like the BBC movies were unable to do. That being said, here's the review:

It is vastly different from the book. I can hear the groans and cries of disappointment already, but hear me out. I'm not usually tolerant of changes, but I realize why they had to do it. Even in the first movie, when Edmund was heading toward the Witch's castle, they had the beavers and the rest of the kids follow him to pretty near the doorstep. That didn't happen in the book, but I could see why they did it: They needed to get the point across that no matter how angry they were with him, they still wanted him safe, and I think they managed that when Peter tried running down the hill and Mister Beaver stopped him.

That being said, the Prince Caspian movie was very nearly completely out of order with a major battle scene inserted that simply wasn't there in the book. It starts off with Caspian being whisked out of his castle with the birth of his uncle's son, not with the kids sitting on the bench at the train station heading back to school. Caspian is chased through the forest and is knocked off his horse. The commotion pulls a couple of dwarves from their tree who are then forced to fight the people chasing Caspian. One dwarf is taken, and Caspian somehow winds up inside the tree. (I'm going on memory from last week, so some details might be sketchy.) He wakes up, he learns he's in a tree with a dwarf (Nikabrik) and a badger... They present him with Susan's horn, leave the tree, and are pursued by more Telmarines who are quickly dispatched by a gang of mice! Somewhere around this time, Caspian blows the horn and then the movie cuts to the kids at the train station. It is worthy to note that Caspian never blew the horn until they were deeply entrenched in Aslan's How and about to be defeated by Miraz's troops. The dwarf, Trumpkin, was NOT captured by Miraz's forces and then taken to the castle... He was sent to find the kids after Caspian blew the horn and was captured only right before he met the kids.

Very neat scene then follows where the train station is torn apart and the kids are left standing in a cave on a beach... Before this, however, Peter was deep in a fight with other guys of his school and were only broken up when some British soldiers showed up. This was also not in the book in the least bit, BUT... I think it provided some... Background? Imagine... They were kings and queens of greatest renown in Narnia and are suddenly thrown back into the real world. There are going to be some problems adjusting to life, and I think Peter's fight and the reasons for the fight helped show that. It gave an ounce of believability.

They learn the beach they showed up on was the beach below their ruined castle Cair Paravel. They find the treasure room... This part is accurate! And it was incredibly chilling how they filmed this part. Very quiet music... A sense of desolation and ruin mixed with the life of overgrown trees and plants. It gave the clear sense that, to them, they'd just left, and now here's their home for 30 years completely destroyed and abandoned. It would be sad and just plain CREEPY, but somehow awesome at the same time. Very nicely handled! But then they meet Trumpkin and are led directly to Caspian who has not yet reached Aslan's How. In the book, they first met Caspian when he was watching them attempt to revive the White Witch. Very departed from the book here... A little disappointing, but I understand the need to inject some excitement into the film. Honestly, in my opinion, Prince Caspian was the least of all seven books. It was sparse, the story was light, and it just felt like a sequel. I don't think it would have been a good movie if WAS accurate and all you did was watch Caspian be beaten repeatedly by Miraz's forces.

Along the way, the movie kept the parts where Lucy kept claiming to see Aslan and nobody would believe her, except Edmund. (Who still didn't believe enough to follow her.) Except they made her dream about the trees, when, in the book, it was real. Also, in the book, the kids found Aslan before they met Caspian. There was a huge party in the forest and the trees woke up and all that... Left out in the movie. Well, not entirely. They met Aslan only after the dual with Miraz when they sent Susan and Lucy to look for him. Entirely wrong, but, eh... It worked, I think.

So after they meet Caspian and reach Aslan's How, Peter assumes control of the army and organizes a force to raid Miraz's castle. Here follows a MASSIVE part of the movie that was not at all in the book, period. I would have been incredibly upset, but, again, I think it worked. The mood of the book was that nobody believed in Aslan anymore and only Lucy was the one who could see him at first. I think the whole castle invasion worked in the sense that it showed that nobody was willing to look for Aslan FIRST and that they were going to do things their way, because they didn't want to wait for Aslan's own time. They send an invading force that breaches the perimeter by using griffons (VERY awesome). Of course, it doesn't at all go well and they lose half of their army in the process... They retreat back to Aslan's How and only then decide to try the whole duel approach to solving the problem. In the book, it was really only Susan who didn't believe in Aslan anymore (which becomes a recurring event in later books). Edmund and Peter seemed to acknowledge that Aslan MIGHT be nearby, but weren't ready to trust him, and the dwarf was just plain anti-Aslan to the extreme. I think the movie made it far more clear that nobody (except Lucy) was willing to trust Aslan with their lives without some sort of proof, and decided to take things into their own hands and were dealt some pretty nasty blows.

Things start getting a little more on track from here on out. Duel happens, Miraz is murdered by his own men and they accuse the Narnians and a battle ensues. Aslan and the trees come to the rescue and the army is defeated and Caspian is crowned king in Miraz's old castle. Aslan offers the Telmarines a return to Earth through a portal nobody could see through, and the Telmarines were too afraid to go through, save for a handful, who were promised a good life for being the first to trust Aslan. When none of the others would attempt passage, Peter said it was time for them to go, and they departed through the portal.

As you can see... Major departure from the book's progression, but, as a whole, I think it conveyed the same points as the book while keeping it interesting for the film medium. They kept the important themes of the book, so I have no complaints. They didn't want to wait on Aslan, so they tried to do things themselves and failed. Still no sign of Aslan, they decided to revive the White Witch, because she would give results, but that ended in near disaster, with Edmund coming to the rescue to stop the process. Finally, only when all hope had faded, they sent Lucy to look for Aslan and they came back to finish the war. I think it's obvious that this was the theme of both the book and the movie.

I'm not going to mention a lot of the special effects or the music or anything... That's not really my department of expertise. Story and canon is where I notice differences. While Prince Caspian is only loosely based on the events of the book, it still portrays characters, moods and themes just as well as the book did. I think this movie is less epic than the first, but I think that also holds true for the book. What I can't wait for is The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I think it's one of my favorite books, so I'll have high expectations. (I think Magician's Nephew is my top favorite, followed by The Last Battle, then The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, A Horse and His Boy, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Silver Chair and finally Prince Caspian.)

Anyway, regardless of the shortcomings, this is definitely a movie worth seeing!

Basic story? The sun is dying. People are dispatched to reignite it. First mission mysteriously fails, so a second mission is sent. The story covers the events of the second mission. During their mission, they come in contact with the first ship. After some very, very unfortunate events resulting from their decision to change course and intercept the failed first mission, their ship is badly damaged and they're forced to intercept the first ship not only to gain a second bomb, but to maybe recover a working ship. They dock, and another series of unfortunate events leads to the discovery that there is a survivor on the first ship who claims he is on a mission from God to let the sun die, because that's what was intended.

Here enter the anti-religion bit. The insane man begins to systematically kill all the members of the second mission to prevent them from saving mankind, because God planned to kill off the human race by extinguishing the sun! Of course, reigniting it would be against God's wishes, so he can't allow them to do it. They, of course, eventually do manage to reignite the sun against all odds... And some people interpret this as a direct stab at religion. Humans decide they're not going to submit to the will of God and they save themselves. Granted, you may think this is reading too much into a science fiction story, because, hey... The guy went insane, maybe killed his own crew, and was stuck on the first ship for seven years, roasting himself with the proximity to the sun, "meditating" on the character of humans and the such. I completely agree that interpreting his ravings as true religion and interpreting the fight against this clearly insane character as a fight against God is stretching it a bit. You have to have a bad guy in these kinds of movies, I mean really. It's psychological horror!

But really, if you want to go down this path, then I'm going to be there to explain what I see when I look at it like this. I believe, that if you're a Christian, nothing that happens to you is going to be something you can't handle, even if it's a punishment. Now, this isn't to say that he's not going to let bad stuff happen. We're still post-Fall humans, and, as such, we've inherited sin and the curses related to it, so bad things are going to happen to us... If, say, you're driving down the road and you see a car headed for you and that car is in your lane, what are you going to do? You're going to swerve, right? Now, I highly doubt that after you swerve and avoid the collision, you're going to say "wow, God must have wanted me dead, but I sure showed him!" You're probably just going to head to the nearest facilities to change into a fresh pair of pants. I would contend that the fact that you survived the incident attests to the fact that God does not want you dead, and, instead, maybe even protected you by not letting the car spin out of control and plow into someone's house. Needless to say, the incident at least startled you... It got your attention. I believe that everything happens for a reason, though those reasons are rarely immediately apparent.

Let's say, right now, hypothetically, that Sunshine is real. Let's say it happened 50 years ago. (Or 500 or 5, it doesn't matter.) You could say that we survived because God wanted us dead and our collective "power" was strong enough to thwart his judgment, or you could say that He caused the problem in an effort to get our attention for some reason, but knew it wouldn't have the catastrophic effects of wiping out all life on the planet, because, after all, He allowed us to complete the mission and save ourselves, and that the crazy man on the Icarus I was nothing but that! A crazy man who was mentally unstable with his obsession with the Sun. Or it could have simply been the result of the curse of sin and that everything decays... In the Sun's case, it decays unless you give it more fuel! That's not necessarily an act of God that made the Sun die. It was a result of our sin, but we were graced with the knowledge and technology to save the Sun and save mankind! The fact that we survived means that it was God's plan for us to survive. Nothing happens without His knowing. If He didn't want the human race to survive, He would have seen to it that our ships never did the job.

Now, people died on those missions, but people die here in ways we can't comprehend or in ways we don't think should have happened. Personally, I don't think people die without a reason... As in, everything has a purpose that can be used for good. We hear about all these awful things in the news and we wonder how such a "loving God could have let that happen," but we never hear about the aftermaths. The death of a loved one could have affected the family in such a way that it brought them closed to God, or it could have provided a means for someone to do some good... And it's all too possible that the means provided were missed by the person it was intended for, too.

The deaths on the missions were the cause of simple human mistakes and the result of a madman who made the wrong choices based on the wrong desires and it had some nasty consequences. They may seem like useless deaths, and maybe they are! But that's because, somewhere along the line, Pinbacker (the insane guy) made the wrong choices. He became infatuated with the Sun and all its glory, and started to believe some very weird things. He chose to make some immoral decisions that weren't corrected and it led to some very nasty consequences. Which leads me to the fact that God doesn't force us to do anything we don't want. Now, technically, He already knows what choices we're going to choose... After all, He invented the very concepts of Time and Space... But He's not going to intervene and make us do anything. Pinbacker made some choices, be they on the ship or earlier in life, that eventually affected his very perception of reality, and there were consequences. The consequences changed what was supposed to happen, but God already knew that the changes were going to happen. It's funky when we're limited to our linear perception of time...

Let me just put it in a nutshell... The Sun was dying, whether by Divine Intervention or the simple laws of thermodynamics that states that all things decay when left to themselves. Pinbacker, captain of the first mission, by himself, made choices that not only failed his own mission and killed the members of his crew, but seriously adversely affected the members of the second mission. The fact that the second (and last possible) mission succeeded only confirms the fact that God did not intend for the human race to die out completely and allowed the mission to succeed and reignite the sun. The fact that the sunshield was damaged and Captain Kaneda lost his life was due to simple human error on the fact that we're no longer the perfect creations we were intended to be, since we inherited the sin of Adam and Eve who chose to sin.

So there you go... For all of those out there who decided that this movie is a course in atheism and decided to take it upon yourselves to look far too deeply into a science fiction story? Here's my response. I mean, it may very well be that the movie was designed to promote atheism and that God is powerless against the will of united humans, but I think the fact remains that it falls short and is far too subtle to notice unless you're actually looking for it. Still, I don't doubt for a second that it's trying to indoctrinate people with something... It's a sad fact that most movies are looking to prove some sort of point, and it's going to be nothing even remotely related to being pro-religion and Christian. Unless, of course, it is... But... There you go.

Having said all this... I still say that it's a great, artistic movie, and it ranks very highly on my list of greatest movies of all time. I think that it's even in the top 5, along with The Black Hole and Chronicles of Narnia. I would still recommend seeing it, if you can stand the blatant, sometimes icky violence and frequent F-bombs and all manner of bad language.

However, I still can't help but feel it's a stereotypical movie. In just about every wolf-centric story, the wolves are either giant evil monsters bent on devouring all of mankind and must be stopped at all costs, or they're misunderstood creatures who everyone is afraid of for the wrong reasons and must be stopped at all costs and they kill humans in self-defense... In either case, wolves are hunted and they kill humans. Doesn't seem to matter how glorified they get or how monstrous they get. So I again ask, can there be a GOOD, original werewolf movie? One that doesn't just rehash everything ever done before? It's like the fantasy genre! It's so stagnant... Everything that's been done is going to be redone over and over. You might have a few stand-outs like Blood and Chocolate or the Doctor Who episode, but not usually!

What I would like to see is a flip-side to the generic werewolf blah-ness... Like, I don't know, has anyone ever thought that it would be a PRIVILEGE to see one? Hey, if I somehow learned that you could willingly change back and forth between human and wolf form, I'm going to be the last person to ever freak out. In fact, I'd probably give you a big hug. Barring, of course, you didn't turn out to be a "disease" werewolf that goes insane every full moon and wreaks havoc all night. (Which, I might add, I would prefer NOT to be the werewolf theory... I'd hope for sane wolf shifters who could pass on their powers.)

But back to the movie, I would suggest you at least check it out, especially if you're a wolf/werewolf buff like me. I thought it was rated R, but it's only PG-13... For violence (which wasn't really so bad compared to other PG-13 movies), sexuality (of which I didn't notice any... I mean, there was a bar scene, but never any... James Bond flagship scenes), and substance abuse...

Substance abuse? Okay... I didn't see any drugs. At all. The only thing I could EVER think they would be referring to? Probably the drinking of alcoholic beverages. But when has THAT ever been considered substance abuse? Okay, not that... Hmm. Well, there's the whole silver-thing... Silver is deadly to werewolves! (I think that's something that should remain stereotypical. Just seems... Somehow... Well, I wouldn't say NICE, but it seems... Normal.) So some guy threw silver dust in a human-form werewolf's face. Yep... Substance abuse. Werewolves getting high off silver dust. Then there's the silver-poisoning antidote... Is THAT substance abuse? If it is, you should stop taking your vitamins. That's substance abuse.

Needless to say, I think it deserves the PG-13 rating for violence and overall themes, but everything listed is a BIT of a reach... There might have been suggestive themes I didn't pick up on, but nothing explicit like that sort of description usually defines.