The movie Prince Caspian has some major differences from the book, and I think the movie is better for it.
As most reviewers have noted, the movie is darker than the book, and darker than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe movie.
The movie is about growing up, especially about male growing up, and the violence and aggressiveness of the male adolescent. It is a war movie, because violence and aggressiveness have their necessary role in a world in which evil must be fought, as Lewis well knew. The book and the movie are set in the Blitz of London.
But anger and aggressiveness must be moderated and not develop into mindless hate and revenge. There are virtues beyond fortitude: prudence, justice, and beyond those, faith and charity.
The move is also about the losses that growing up brings. As in the book, Peter and Susan will never again return to Narnia.
The imagination of the twenty-first century has taken on a dark tone. Although the twentieth century was filled with wars and the threat of nuclear destruction, but Lewis’s and Tolkien’s books are lighter in tone than their film incarnations, even though both authors saw the trenches and mass slaughter of World War I.
I noticed this in Battlestar Galactica, which was far more serious and far darker than the original series.
If the filmmakers get to The Last
Wish I’d seen this earlier.