{"id":634,"date":"2008-05-18T11:59:51","date_gmt":"2008-05-18T11:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/05\/prince-caspian-battles.html"},"modified":"2008-05-18T11:59:51","modified_gmt":"2008-05-18T11:59:51","slug":"prince-caspian-battles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/05\/prince-caspian-battles.html","title":{"rendered":"Prince Caspian Battles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Katie and Joseph saw\u00a0this yesterday. They both liked it. I confess to little interest – I read the books when I was twelve, and again to my older children ages ago (Joseph is just about ready to start on his own, perhaps), and the whole Lewis\/Tolkein fictional opus has never had any pull on me. I had to force myself to reading the Fellowship just so I could have some sort of reference point in discussions. Just not my thing.
\nBut anyway…here are some links to varied views of the film, released this weekend:
\nThomas Hibbs<\/a><\/p>\n

The real problem with the film, I\u2019m saddened to report, has to do with Aslan. This is due in part to the book\u2019s relegation of him to a more marginal role than he had in the first book. On screen, he seems almost like one of the other animals \u2014 more powerful, certainly, but not all that mysterious. Except for when he roars, he is more cuddly than fearful. His admonitions to Lucy about the importance of fidelity to him come off as formulaic. A sign of the extent to which Aslan has been diminished in the film is evident in the penultimate scene, in which the children depart Narnia. In the book, they say goodbye to everyone else and then, last, \u201cwonderfully and terribly,\u201d as Lewis puts it, \u201cit was farewell to Aslan himself.\u201d
\nBy contrast, in the film, the parting culminates with Susan\u2019s sorrow over leaving Caspian. The scene is sweet and innocent enough, but it cultivates in the audience the mundane sense of unrealized romantic possibility, rather than the grand appreciation, both terrible and wonderful, of a cosmic romance of redemption.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Frederica Mathewes-Green:<\/a><\/p>\n

While Tolkien\u2019s works are vast and grave, Lewis\u2019s Narnia stories feel unaffected, sympathetic, homey. If in The Lord of the Rings<\/em> someone is always swinging an axe at the head of a monster, in The Chronicles of Narnia<\/em> he is getting out of the rain, warming up by the fire, and having some tea and biscuits. I think that Lewis had a better knack for storytelling than Tolkien did; I recorded the Narnia books as well, and could feel the difference.<\/p>\n

But as charming as the Narnia stories are, the movies give them more body, more strength. That\u2019s especially true with this latest, Prince Caspian<\/em>. One of my correspondents, Stuart Koehl, sketches out a theory:<\/p>\n

In many ways, Caspian is the weakest of the Narnia books, showing the effect of hurried composition, imperfect familiarity with the characters, and the need to present a message about the role of Christians in a time of war (it was a propaganda as well as an apologetic piece). A screenwriter would have the whole Narnia corpus in front of him, and knowing the mythology from beginning to end, could remove inconsistencies and sand down the rough edges.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Msgr. Eric Barr:<\/a><\/p>\n

This is a movie about what happens when you leave faith behind and think it is just a childish thing.\u00a0 It’s a film about how such necessary belief is often replaced by darkness and sin represented by pride and vainglory.\u00a0 None of the secular reviews can mention this, but it is striking how much of St. Paul is in this film.\u00a0 Remember in First Corinthians when he says, “When I was a child, I talked like a child…When I became a man, I put childish things aside.”\u00a0 His childish things were pride and jealousy and anger.\u00a0 He points out clearly that faith, hope and love are needed if one wants to become truly an adult.\u00a0 We will never see God clearly here, says St. Paul, but if we believe, we’ll see enough to know that God is by our side.\u00a0 Kudos to Adamson for constructing the Aslan sequences to make this point crystal clear.\u00a0 To really see, one has to believe.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jeffrey Overstreet<\/a>
\nSteven Greydanus<\/a>
\nIn addition, Jeffrey has pulled together a post centered on exploring if and how the film stripped the book of meaning<\/a>
\nFr. Dwight Longenecker on why he likes Tolkein better, anyway. <\/a>
\n\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Katie and Joseph saw\u00a0this yesterday. They both liked it. I confess to little interest – I read the books when I was twelve, and again to my older children ages ago (Joseph is just about ready to start on his own, perhaps), and the whole Lewis\/Tolkein fictional opus has never had any pull on me.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nPrince Caspian Battles - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/05\/prince-caspian-battles.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Prince Caspian Battles - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Katie and Joseph saw\u00a0this yesterday. They both liked it. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}