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The Harry Potter series also does a better job in how it deals with aging and maturing as a teen, with all that that entails, added on top of a backdrop of a dark evil rising that threatens to destroy the world. Peter, Susan, and the others are now skilled warriors fighting battles in far off lands, and while this more adult vibe is appropriate, it comes at the expense of the sense of discovery that made The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe special. When I speak of an absence in dealing with the fact that the Pevensies have already aged once and how this needs to be represented, I think (oddly enough) of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard winds up living an alternate life on a dying alien planet and living it in real time, for decades, up to almost his dying breath, before returning to the Enterprise and finding barely an hour has passed from his departure. The weight of that experience and the psychic scars are immense, I imagine, and The Next Generation managed to at least invoke that. This is the absence at the heart of the second Narnia film (and book too, I would argue) and this air of something missing ultimately weighs the narrative down.

Since the Narnia stories take place in different epochs, with recurring characters in some and all-new ones in others, perhaps they aren't all meant to make the leap to the big screen. Not that this will prevent them from being adapted, of course (a certain level of diminishing box office returns needs to be reached for that to happen.) It will become obvious with future Chapter Two columns - if not already - that science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction are quite my favorite genres. On a case by case basis, I can appreciate and evaluate (although to offer the exception that proves the rule, my favorite TV show of all time is about a certain vampire slayer, so go figure) and Prince Caspian is an enjoyable and exhausting epic, with the hundreds of millions, as they say, up on the screen.

If it winds up as just slightly more than that, it's not a blasphemy against the filmmakers or the source material (Lewis had little concern, as I recall, with devoting the lion's share of his prose to extended metal clanging.) What will stand out for me in the end, what I hold on to with a pang of melancholic regret at what Prince Caspian might have been, is the White Queen's plaintive hand, outstretched and grasping towards the unleashing of unimaginable horrors, and of the actress behind the hand, a spy hidden in plain sight, embedded in the middle of a billion dollar franchise. I will take my subversive pleasures wherever I can.

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