Christianity Today: 2 1/2 stars (out of 4) for Prince Caspian

Are you looking forward to the appearance of Bacchus in Prince Caspian?

Alas, you won’t see that scene.

That’s just the beginning of the cuts that concern Peter T. Chattaway in his review of the movie at Christianity Today.

Chattaway writes:

For all their talk of staying true to the spirit of C. S. Lewis’s novels, the makers of the Narnia films have frequently deviated from the books in ways both big and small, and the liberties they take with Prince Caspian—which echo but go far, far beyond the liberties they took with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—both help the film and hurt it. They help because you can sense that co-writer and director Andrew Adamson is finally making the big epic fantasy battle movie that he really wanted to make the first time around, and his devotion to that vision holds Prince Caspian together and makes it a more consistent, and consistently entertaining, sort of film than Wardrobe was. But in steering the film closer to his own vision, Adamson steers it away from Lewis’s, and so it loses some of the book’s core spiritual themes.

Loses some of the themes? Like what?

Lewis wanted to give his readers—including Christians who had unthinkingly bought into modernity—a taste of the spiritual realm that animates our physical world. And since he believed that the pagan, pre-Christian man had a greater aptitude for the spiritual realm, and was thus easier to convert, than the secular, post-Christian man, Lewis wrote the Narnia books to introduce his readers to a “baptized” form of paganism. Nowhere is this more explicit than in the original book version of Prince Caspian, in which the Christ-figure Aslan literally dances with the Greco-Roman god Bacchus.

But Adamson and his co-writers, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, show no interest in that particular theme. Gone from this film are any and all references to Bacchus, Silenus or the Maenads—figures as important to this story as Father Christmas was to Wardrobe—and gone too are the scenes in which Aslan and his followers trash the schools that teach Narnian children not to believe in myths and fairy tales. And because those scenes are missing, the divine lion Aslan (voice of Liam Neeson) has very little to do. Indeed, Aslan is almost entirely written out of the movie altogether. His first appearance—an actual encounter with Lucy in the book—is here heavily abbreviated, and quickly revealed to be a dream. It is only in the film’s final reels that Aslan indisputably steps onto the stage and takes action.

Wow.

Chattaway does find the film quite entertaining.

But I just wish that efforts like this one, and like Alfonzo Cuaron’s extraordinary film Children of Men, would do away with the label “Based on the book.” Rather, they are new stories, “Inspired by elements of the book.”

I love what was announced at the beginning of the film The Name of the Rose: “A Palimpsest of the Novel.” That tells you right there that this is *not* going to be the story written by Umberto Eco. Rather, it’s commercial entertainment in which someone else’s premise was reimagined, shaped into something new.

Now, contrary to how it may seem, I’m not “out to get” Prince Caspian. It sounds like an exciting action adventure. I’m just questioning any filmmaker or publicist who talks about bringing C.S. Lewis’s story to the screen. Because if the reviews I’m reading are true… they didn’t do that.