Prince Caspian

After a quiet, steady day at school before the long weekend, I took a nap and headed out to see Prince Caspian. It was good. Dark, complicated, filled with the sense that things aren't the way children expect or adults want them to be. It was largely about believing things and being wrong, which makes others suffer, or believing things and being right, but standing alone because no one else shares your vision. A lot of changes were made, but I didn't mind them at all. Obviously, Susan was made more of an action hero, but that was extremely cool. She was very believable, standing in the middle of heated battle, wearing long skirts, with her sleeves rolled up, turning slowly and grimly around and skewering with arrows anyone who advanced on her, advising Peter, flirting with Caspian and commanding the archers. Anna Popplewell has really grown up too. She is too dignified and articulate, with a low, cultured voice, to seem quite as silly and vain and the character is supposed to be in the books.

The fact that it is is hard to know how to interact with others if you believe things they think are silly or crazy, and the fact that sometimes you need to know when to stop, because your beliefs aren't shared by others who therefore cannot be expected to support you at risk to their own selves, this was all presented quite well. The only problem with it was that it was a bit too complicated in terms of there being a lot of things going on, with a lot of hurried conversations by people with thick accents, making points easy to miss. Some parts felt artificially tossed in to tidy things up at the end, even though they were in the book. There are some things that you can get away with in a book, that in a movie sound like the character is saying a little blurb that the author has suddenly decided to cobble together in order to wrap up loose ends.

It is cold and rainy and still today. Battlestar Galactica is coming off as hurried and confused lately, with too many people abruptly and "dramatically" getting killed in an attempt to keep the action going. It's like not a lot is happening, so they just toss in some violence, misunderstandings, shouting matches, awkward relationship talks and the like to stall.