A year after the Pevensie kids had the adventure of a lifetime in ‘The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe’ they have found that adjusting to the mundane life in everyday 1940’s London to be a challenge at best, particularly Peter (William Moseley) who takes the slightest offense as a cause to come to blows and finds not being recognized as King Peter the Magnificent by anyone in this world we currently live in pretty much sucks. Fortunately his baby brother Edmund (Skandar Keynes) is usually not far behind to assist his brother in his frequent fracases, though his sisters Lucy (Georgie Henley) and Susan (Anna Popplewell) find the boys pugilistic antics a bit tiresome. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, these kids will be making a return trip to Narnia, a Narnia that is quite different from the one they left in the new film ‘The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian’.

Actually the story starts with the birth of a son to Duke Miraz (Sergio Castellito) who is the defacto ruler of the land of Tamermarine, at least until Prince Caspian (Ben Burns) is ready to take over. This birth of this boy is quite bad for the young Prince since Miraz has been looking for just about any excuse to kill the boy, deeming him unfit to rule. Warned in the middle of the night by his tutor Cornelius (Vincent Gass) and given a horn to use when all seems lost, he is sent into the mysterious woods with Miraz’s soldiers hot on his tail. Just when it seems as the Prince has met his end he blows the horn and unknowingly summons the four Pevensie kids back to Narnia to help save it from its current state.

The Narnia the kids once remembered is no more as over a hundred years have passed in the one year that they have been gone. The Narnians are thought to be extinct, hunted and killed by the Tameranians and the lands are in ruins, but they have managed to run into a crusty rusty dwarf named Trumpkin (The great Peter Dinklage) who is

filling them in as to what happened while they were gone and how dire the situation has become. Young Lucy however knows that whatever the problem is it can be cured if only they can find the whereabouts of the great lion Aslan (Liam Neeson), but Peter and the rest have determined that time is short and if Aslan were actually alive he’d be there to help them so they must move on without his help. Other problems arise in the form of Peter and Caspian being at constant odds with each other, complicated by Caspian’s growing affections for Peter’s sister Susan. There is also the lure of the enchanting, though evil to the core White Witch (Tilda Swinton), who would like nothing more than to free herself from her prison and pick up where she left off. Now the Prince and the young Kings and Queens of Narnia, along with all those talking animals find themselves facing a foe that they have very little chance in defeating, with their only hope being one little girl and her steadfast belief that a King, long thought by most during this time to be nothing but a myth, can save them and their land.

‘Prince Caspian’ is a completely different film from the ‘The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe’ and tells a completely different tale that is darker, more violent, and in many ways better than the first film. Again deftly directed by Andrew Adamson, this time he places the Pevensie children in a real world that they long to get away from, to be back into place where they once mattered, only to find that they are stuffed back into a world where they don’t matter nearly as much as they thought they would. It is interesting to witness how Adamson has smartly kept the lessons that the children have learned in the first film and applied these lessons quite practically to the second film, allowing us to see how they have grown in their year away from Narnia.

Of course despite whatever relationship dynamics and lessons that may be learned in this film, it is first and foremost a big budget special effect laden summertime adventure movie and the movie comes through flawlessly in this presentation giving us huge medieval battles between humans, minotaur’s, centaurs and other fantastical creatures and amazing settings, and thrilling action sequences. Adamson strikes a nice balance between myth and reality, seamlessly combining the two and completely immersing you into this newer fantasy world of Narnia that he has created.

The movie is also pretty darned violent in that belies its PG rating as a PG-13 is probably is way more appropriate considering more people and creatures died in this movie than in ‘Rambo’. It was largely bloodless violence, but it was death nonetheless, however I suppose the MPAA and Disney have an ‘understanding’ which is why I can only guess as to why this didn’t get the higher, much more deserved rating. The performances where also very good with the four young people completely comfortable in their roles as the Kings and Queens of Narnia and Peter Dinklage yet again providing a great performance as the dwarf Trumpkin. Ben Barnes was more Gap Model than swashbuckling Prince and came off as a bit dry and will certainly need to step his game for the third movie that’s due to be released in a couple of years.

‘The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian’ doesn’t disappoint and is a fine sequel to the original film, one that I actually enjoyed more than the first film and I thought that the original movie was pretty good in its own right. Highly recommended.