Product: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (Two Disc Edition + BD-Live) [Blu-ray] (2008)
Rating: 4.0
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This the darker, more world-weary follow-up to "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe', wherein four English schoolchildren go through a mysterious old wardrobe and emerge into a wondrous enchanted land of talking animals, dancing trees, a wicked ice-witch and the noble lion Aslan. Peter and Edmund, Susan and Lucy Pevensie ruled as kings and queens of this place, after defeating the winter witch. They ruled wisely and with success and happiness, growing into adulthood ... before abruptly returned to their prosaic real lives, as children, in World War II era Britain. It is now a year later - and the older children have begun adjusting unhappily to the reality they were returned to. Without apparent warning, however, they are restored to Narnia - going from a dark and grimy subway platform in wartime Britain, to a sea-cave leading out to glorious sunlit seashore. Almost at once, it becomes clear that this is Narnia a thousand years later. The castle from which they governed is in ruins, and the invading Telmarines have driven the marvelous creatures - the dwarves, the talking animals, the not-so-mythical creatures into the margins, into the deep woods. Things have changed, while they were away - and almost at once they meet and strike an alliance with the fugitive Prince Caspian. He is of the Telmarine royalty, and in this millennium the rightful ruler of Narnia, but his usurping Uncle Miraz plotted to kill him, as soon as Miraz' wife bore him a son. And that is the rest of the story - how Prince Caspian forms an alliance with not just the Pevensies, but with the original inhabitants of Narnia - the beasts and mythical creatures and even the forces of nature itself. The movie is beautifully visualized, and the locations where it was filmed are uniformly stunning - almost stars in their own right, along with the special effects.Of the lavish extras included - the usual bloopers, `making of' and `behind the scenes' features, the stand-out is an extensive look at the `pre-vis' technology. It seems that increasingly very complicated; special-effect dependent movies such as this are almost completely done in a sort of a computer-animated story-board version before shooting begins. This is done for several reasons - to work out the mechanics of the shot, to allow the actors to know what the director has in mind for a particular sequence (which may take many days or weeks to complete!) and to show to producers and investors, so that they may know what they are getting. In the case of Prince Caspian, the `pre-vis' is almost an entire secondary movie.