Pacific Highlander

Prince Caspian at the movies

I managed to see a preview of Prince Caspian at the movies on Friday May 9, as a member of the press. Having read the Narnia books as a young boy, I was reasonably familiar with the story and expected a swash-buckling effects-laden experience. I was not disappointed. Here’s the trailer.

Filming was shot by NZ director/producer Andrew Adamson, whose earlier work includes Shrek I, 2 and 3, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Familiar NZ scenes for me were the Dart River near Glenorchy (I spent a week walking through there in 1991) and Cathedral Cove on the Coromandel Peninsula (I spent Christmas there in 1982). Studio shots were filmed in Barrandov Studios, Prague, Czech Republic. Other scenes were filmed in Slovenia and Poland.

As Trumpkin says, “You may find Narnia a more savage place than you remember”. Adamson takes the stories of battle hinted at by C.S. Lewis and brings them to the foreground. People and creatures die, though without any clear bloodshed. This is a family movie after all. A whole new sequence is added to the plot - the storming of the Telmarine castle. Battle scenes are provided with elaborate plot twists.

In the book the Pevensies (Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy) connect up with the Narnians towards the end. For the sake of dramatic interplay between the characters (including tension between Peter and Caspian) that meeting is introduced much earlier.

Adamson brings the story into the 21st century with an alternative to the C.S. Lewis sheltering of the female gender. Susan is clearly engaged in battle in the movie and enjoys a romantic attraction to Caspian. “It would never have worked out”, she says.

There are subtle flavours added by the casting team. Caspian, Miraz and the other Telmarines speak with Hispanic accents, a reference to their pirate origins. The centaurs appear to have an African origin. It makes good sense in terms of increasing the ethnic spread of the audience, but runs the risk of perpetuating the English jingoism that formed the backdrop of C.S. Lewis’ world.

My favourite character would have to be Trumpkin, played by Peter Dinklage. This dwarf has a deeply cynical, humorous and yet reflective character that appears to have been developed through years of patient long suffering.

The theology of this C.S. Lewis novel is subtle, with hints of questions relating to the absence and invisible nature of Jesus. Why can some see him and others not? Would the plot have been different if Lucy and her siblings had responded to Aslan’s guidance earlier? Aslan twice reminds Lucy that things don’t happen the same way twice, once in a dream sequence and once in waking mode. Was that a glitch in the script or an example of dramatic irony?

Be prepared for a long movie with stunning cinematography, simmering effects and a storyline that will keep you guessing.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, will be released in cinemas nationally in Australia on June 5. Heritage HM will also be delivering a range of resources to churches and schools Australia wide. For details contact 07 5445 6865 or email info at astounded.tv.

Tags: CS Lewis, Fiction, Movies, Narnia

Posted in Movies, New Zealand | 1 Comment »

C S Lewis on Heaven

Here’s the quote we’ll be using tomorrow night, from C S Lewis’ book, “The Great Divorce”. It’s his response to the picture provided by William Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”.

I was alone in the the bus, and through the open door there came to me in the fresh stillness the singing of a lark.

I got out. The light and coolness that drenched me were like those of summer morning, early morning a minute or two before the sunrise, only that there was a certain difference. I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extgent of the green plain wider that they could be on this little ball of earth. I had ‘got out’ in some sense which made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair. It gave me a feeling of freedom but also of exposure, possibly of danger, which continued to accompany me through all that followed. it is the impossibly of communicating that feeling, or even of inducing you to remember it as I proceed, which makes me despair of conveying the real quality of what I saw and heard.

At first, of course, my attention was caught by my fellow passengers, who were still grouped about in the neighbourhood of the omnibus, though beginning, some of them, to walk forward into the landscape with hesitating steps. I gasped as I saw them. Now that they were in the light, they were transparent - fully transparent when they stood between me and it, smudgy and imperfectly opaque when they stood in the shadow of some tree. They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air. One could attend to them or ignore them at will as you do with the dirt on a window pane. I noticed that the grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed.

Then some readjustment of the mind or some focussing of my eyes took place, and I saw the whole phenomenon the other way round. The men were as they had always been: as all the men I had known perhaps. It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different: made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that people were ghosts by comparison.

The Great Divorce at Amazon.com

Tags: CS Lewis, heaven and hell

Posted in Reading, Spirituality, Theology | 1 Comment »