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The battle scenes are viscerally impressive and uniformly well staged (on a budget upswing from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe's $165 million to $225 million) and suggest to me one of the more convincing uses of CGI-intensive filmmaking this decade. The merging of actors with characters and backdrops that aren't there seems definitely real and convincing (as opposed to almost so lifelike that they end up seeming, ironically, patently fake and unconvincing, of which Peter Jackson's King Kong is a recent criminal perpetrator that springs to mind.) And the sword fighting, armor clanging and bow thwacking are very intense indeed. There is no visible blood (which seems to be the MPAA's baseline for how to approach violent content) but necks are snapped, arrows fell scores of soldiers and it is strongly implied that throats are slit, repeatedly, especially by the valiant though tiny mouse, Reepicheep.

By the end of Prince Caspian, even Aslan the lion has returned briefly (though he is more respective of a figurehead here than his more nuanced character the first time around) to mete out watery retribution by calling on the forces of water and drowning the evil king's remaining forces in a devastating flood. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had its share of battles and loss but it also had a more captivating villain in the White Witch and more time devoted to the actual wonder and awe of discovery of a new world by the Pevensie children, the means to return to that land via a magic portal and a sense of destiny fulfilled as Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy took their rightful places as rulers of Narnia.

But inherent in Lewis' first two Narnia novels is an absence that the films can't quite grapple with: the fact that the children have already grown old here once before, at the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, before making their way home and resuming their original ages, and have now returned from England a year older from their first adventures, whereas 1,300 years have passed in Narnia. This passage of time is the crux of the story, but it is never really dealt with. The return appearances of Aslan and the White Witch provide some much-needed heft. An image of the faun Tumnus is glimpsed rendered on a wall. Links to the past abound, but since the focus is on Prince Caspian this time around (his name is in the title), the Pevensies seem like window dressing in the continuation of their own adventures. The script deals with this by making the battle sequences the star of the film and it works, up to a point. But the attachment to the characters (and the actors portraying them) isn't there like it is with the Harry Potter series, for example. The one performer truly allowed to shine by virtue of having a well-written role and an original take on how to play it is Peter Dinklage and his embodiment of the dwarf Trumpkin. Standing every cliché about dwarves, trolls,and the like on their collective heads, he has a gravitas, a wit and a wounded sense of self-worth all boiled together that make him the greatest special effect in the film most of the running time.

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