So Jane bought the DVD of Prince Caspian at Costco the other day, and we watched it this evening.
What an unmitigated load of rubbish. Spectacle everywhere, sense nowhere; complete disrpect for the source material; personalities savaged; Peter acting like a tomfool instead of the High King of Narnia; Reepicheep being rude; Lucy sitting on the Stone Table, for goodness sake, for all the world like Mary Magdalene having a bit of a sit-down on the True Cross.
I don’t think so.
What an out-and-out utter travesty. I have never, in my entire life, been so disappointed by a movie. My expectations were low to begin with (or I’d have seen it ages ago in the theater), but I am still flabbergasted. I had problems with Peter Jackson’s version of The Lord of the Rings, and particularly with The Return of the King…but the people behind this piece of awfulness make even Ralph Bakshi look good. If they couldn’t tell Lewis’s story, at least they could have told a story that made sense. I simply don’t have words for how gruesomely, grotesquely, stupidly bad this crock of sh*t is.
I don’t usually write hatchet jobs, and I’ll no doubt regret this one in the morning…but nearly as much as I regret this film.
Sigh.
No doubt C.S. Lewis himself finds all of this terribly funny, but I don’t yet have his perspective.
The View from the Foothills 
I knew going in that the movie was different. The movie authors wanted stronger roles for Susan and Peter; some other minor details like trouble doing long flashbacks would make a different structure.
My response was more regret than anger. The movie authors didn’t know how to turn a long walk through the forest into a suspenseful, challenging, tense journey.
They didn’t know how to show Cornelius gaining Caspian’s trust, nor did they know how to give the viewer the feel of being in a society that is trying to repress memories of the past.
They didn’t get the lesson in faith that is central to the book. (The previous Narnia movie was weak, but still workable, in translating themes of forgiveness, redemption, and substitutionary death).
Worse, they tried to make it more modern by mixing in a love-story, between two characters who should never be seen together again in the series. (Imagine the scene in Dawn Treader when Caspian asks Edmund and Lucy how their brother and sister are doing…)
They didn’t even take the time to deal with practical necessities of the story, like how the children lived, ate, and slept while alone in the ruined Cair Paravel.
Finally, the movie lost the mix of comic joy that is mixed in with Aslan’s majestic power.
With all that, several things stood out as being good. I doubt that Lewis specified how Miraz made his power-grab, the movie does it by referring to his position among the Lords, and the fiction that he was first-among-equals while young Caspian was still a minor royal.
Also, the scene with the attempt to resurrect the dead White Witch was extremely well-done, as was the single-combat.
While an entertaining movie, it is not a good Narnia movie.
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Film is a different medium than the written page, and you need to tell stories in different ways; I don’t object to that. The scenes set in Isengard in The Fellowship of the Ring are an outstanding example: we need to see what’s going on, and extended flashbacks don’t work, as you point out.
Still, while you can’t tell the story the same way, you should at least tell the same story. Even that bar is too high for most filmmakers, and I knew going in that the makers of Prince Caspian hadn’t reached it. The scene with the White Witch is a case in point, here: yes, it’s an effective seen, but it’s based on a bogus reading of the characters of Peter and Caspian.
No, what gets my goat is that not only don’t they tell the same story, they do a lousy job of telling the story they’ve got. I could have come up with a dozen examples a couple of days ago; things are blessedly hazy. But here’s an example: the characters do not behave consistently. A lord whose grip on the throne is weak doesn’t send a troop of soldiers to kill the rightful heir to throne with a storm of arrows; he arranges for it to look like an accident. The pieces of the movie simply don’t make sense together.
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