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READ MORE: Prince Caspian at the NYC Comic-Con

PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 5/19/08)

One year in London-time and 1,300 in Narnia-time have passed since the Pevensie kids' sojourn through the wardrobe, and Narnia is no longer the wintry, welcoming playland it once was. While they were gone, a boatload of piratical Telmarines stumbled in through a wormhole of their own and took root, establishing a medieval-style kingdom that eventually crowded out the natives. The Narnians who survived, a hodge-podge of talking animals, dwarves, centaurs and meddling supernatural figures like the White Witch and Aslan, a saintly lion-deity with the sotto voce of Liam Neeson, live in a woodsy ghetto, out of sight and mind of the Telmarines. Their dominance now unchallenged, the Telmarines begin squabbling amongst themselves over who should rule their magical empire.

Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) is in line for the Telmarine throne until his ornery Uncle Miraz (Sergio Castellitto) gets the idea to bump him off, sending Caspian scrambling for allies in the Narnian part of town. There, he finds a magic horn that, when tooted, immediately yanks the four Pevensie kids back into Narnia. No furniture required this time — the outer wall of a London Tube station instead de-bricks before their eyes — but after 1,300 years, they find that they are remembered in Narnia only as Arthur-like legends from a past too distant to be verifiable. However, the Pevensies very quickly reclaim their titles as Narnian kings and queens, do a quick spit-palm pact with Prince Caspian and start prepping for a battle royale against the Telmarines.

Though defiantly bloodless and typically angle-obscured, the film's violent moments retain a bracing quality through their walloping cumulative total and their context, peppered as they are throughout a dark, humorless fantasy of ethnic warfare, full of wizardly portents and religious austerity. Put the four Pevensie kids side by side in a line-up, and only Peter, the flaxen-haired teen idol, looks old enough to be let into the theater for this film. It's shocking that Prince Caspian only received a PG rating.

As with the last film, director Andrew Adamson follows the Lord of the Rings playbook religiously, mushrooming action cues from the books into mega-scale battle set pieces (again, very violent) and making it up in places where the book doesn't deliver the goods, such as in an invented cameo for Tilda Swinton as the White Witch, which turns out to be a welcome touch. With the blockbuster Prince Caspian under his belt, Adamson's reputation should now be cemented as an upmarket helmer for hire — a director who can be counted on to shoot an expansive, multi-faceted adventure film with competence and attention to detail, but also without much original thinking or a creative spark that might give some studio executive night sweats.

Even when this film works, it still feels like all the important decisions, including the acting ones, were agreed upon months in advance of shooting. There's a persistent surface level, one-off quality to the whole business that repels emotional involvement at every juncture and seems stylistically in keeping with Disney's reluctance to greenlight each new Narnia film until the last one has proven itself at the box-office.

That polite distance between the filmmakers and their movie is most jarring when the religious themes of the books bubble up, more so in this film than in the last. Adamson rows softly against the theological tide where possible, acknowledging but preferring not to dwell on Caspian's parable of Christian faith rewarded and doubt punished. Aslan, the Jesus-figure of the books, petulantly sits out the main action this go-round because only young Lucy (Georgie Henley) seeks out his help. When she announces having visions of Aslan to her siblings, mid-adventure, they ignore her and continue undeterred in their plans. And the punishment eventually meted out to Susan (Anna Popplewell) for failing Aslan's tests in the Narnia books is so unusual and harsh that her individual failure and Aslan's reaction in this film would seem to warrant a half hour of storytelling, but instead it's handled in a quick pirouette of careful dialogue, tearful looks and resigned joy. As a wildly popular character in C.S. Lewis lore and one of major interest to critics due to her ultimate fate in the series, she deserves better. Unfortunately, more time was spent on sword-swinging than character development.

— Ryan Stewart