The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

The Chronicles of Narnia is sort of the more child friendly, overbearingly Christian cousin of The Lord of the Rings, and after the success of the latter as a film franchise, there's little surprise that someone would follow suit with the former. The first movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was pretty decent to my memory. It's less of a war movie in places and more of a kid's fairy tale, but it had some interesting ideas.

I liked Prince Caspian more though, as it seems more focused on telling a complete story and is just more confident with everything. There's no Mr. Tumnus prancing around or Turkish Delight being eaten, just the story of a war for the future of the land. The action scenes are actually pretty darn good for a PG movie, from a clandestine assault on a castle by moonlight to a deadly show of single combat on the field of battle. They make a point of showing how hundreds of years have passed since the last time the kids appeared in Narnia, with most of the mystical creatures sequestered into the forest and the rest reverted into wild animals. A human empire has taken over the land, and the battle between them and the natives is a nice contrast with the first movie which had their loyalties divided between a magical lady and a magical Jesus cat.

Um... yeah. Movies. A lot of the humor is kind of obvious and cheesy, but there are a couple chuckles to be had. Eddie Izzard plays a talking mouse, and his lines all kind of suck but it's still cool because he's Eddie Izzard. The kids are uniformly less annoying than the first movie, which is good. If there's one thing sequels have over initial installments it's not having to waste time establishing familiarity with setting and characters and all that. The uh... the special effects are pretty good. The battles are nice but the ending was fairly Deus Ex Machina. I'm willing to watch more of these movies, especially since the next one has such a bad ass title. Go look it up. Seriously, bad ass.