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Really??? I'm so sad. My kids are psyched to go see this.

Tricia: I found this movie so unbelievably violent, that I couldn't believe it was for kids. Really. And, for me, I'm not sure why...the violence was much stronger than in other kids. Maybe because the movie really is just one long battle. With the exception of a few lines about Aslan, fighting is ALL that happens. I'm still sore.

Re: racism. Your kids won't notice it. But I really do think this kind of subtle racism is dangerous. The bad guys are all Middle Eastern looking as well as slightly shiny--as if they want them to look "greasy" They all have accents. (The accents are mixed--I heard various Middle Eastern, a Spanish, and an Italian.) They all have big noses, and are filmed frequently from the side.

Now the book specifies the enemy is "dark" or "oriental" (or something, I can't remember--I just remember being horrified as a kid--because, really, if the "good side" is something entirely different, why should the bad guys be the same old bad guys?)

Also, even on the Narnian side, the dwarf who tries to get Prince Caspian (who, btw, is the lightest and smallest nosed member of the Telmarine)to seek the help from the White Witch is soooooo stereotypically Jewish looking it was painfuly. Shylock, Judas, etc.

So, yeah, in summary...I wish I hadn't taken my kids to this movie. You could maybe take your eldest, but I wouldn't take the little one.

Should drink cofee first. Two fixes:

"the violence was much stronger than in other kids"

Fix: "Than in other kid movies..."

"soooooo stereotypically Jewish looking it was painfuly"

Fix: "it was painful"

Tricia: I found this movie so unbelievably violent, that I couldn't believe it was for kids. Really. And, for me, I'm not sure why...the violence was much stronger than in other kid movies. Maybe because the movie really is just one long battle. With the exception of a few lines about Aslan, fighting is ALL that happens. I'm still sore.

Re: racism. Your kids won't notice it. But I really do think this kind of subtle racism is dangerous. The bad guys are all Middle Eastern looking as well as slightly shiny--as if they want them to look "greasy." They all have accents. The accents are mixed--I heard various Middle Eastern, a Spanish, and an Italian. This may have been an editorial choice, so the bad guys couldn't be easily identified as Middle Eastern. But, it's clear that swarthy+accent=bad guys. They also all have big noses, and are filmed frequently from the side.

Now the book also specifies the enemy is "dark" or "oriental" (or something, I can't remember exactly--I just remember being horrified as a kid--because, really, if the "good side" is something entirely different [Narnia], why should the bad guys be the same old bad guys?)

Also, even on the Narnian side, the dwarf who tries to get Prince Caspian (who, btw, is the lightest and smallest nosed member of the Telmarine)to seek the help from the White Witch is soooooo stereotypically Jewish looking it was painful. Shylock, Judas, etc.

So, yeah, in summary...I wish I hadn't taken my kids to this movie. You could maybe take your eldest, but I wouldn't take the little one.

Oh, no. Yuck. Thank you for the review, Kelly. We will stay away.

Did you see the first (recent) Narnia movie? Is it any better? I was thinking of renting it.

Susan: I haven't seen the first Narnia movie. But I've heard it's pretty good!

I thought I'd read good reviews of Caspian, but what I'd really read (once I looked back...) was that the production value and special effects were good. Which they were :)

OK - We'll head to the IMAX instead. :)
Actually, I just got the list of free movies offered every week here in Austin, so I plan to hit the ones I can of those this summer.

The first Narnia movie was okay, I thought. But little things will ruin it for me -- like Susan and Lucy (I think it was) riding off into the sunset toward the end on Aslan, and their hair's not even moving.

Maybe I'm unfair. The special effects disappointed me.

It's too bad to hear all this about the second movie. Thanks, though, Kelly, for the heads-up.

I hadn't been dying to see Prince Caspian, but I'd felt perhaps obligated as a kid lit person to see it. I'm taking your comments as my permission to skip it. Life is too short for bad movies, esp bad violent racist movies.

To be fair on CS Lewis, he couldn't really have foreseen that our popular 'bad guys' today would be Middle Eastern; he could have made his Calormenes like Germans, now that would have been racist. Obvously he was harking back to the Crusades with his juxtaposition of Anglo Saxon Narnians with Arabic Calormenes, and perhaps that was ill judged, but on the other hand, his enemy has to come from somewhere, and if they are from a more southern clime, they would be darker skinned.

However it is a shame that the filmmakers have apparently chosen to accentuate rather than play this down. In the LOTR adaptations (where Tolkien's text offers a similar dilemma) the Southrons weren't depicted as black Africans, nor the Easterlings as especially Russian/Oriental.

Thanks for highlighting the racism problem, Kelly.

To Nick: Being what Tolkien might consider both an "Easterling" and a "Southron" (my mother is from Belarus, and my father from Bangladesh), I found this aspect of LOTR quite painful, actually. Even though I really liked the movies overall, remembering the "men of the West" exhortations and the way the South Asian- and Arab-looking people on oliphaunts were made to look evil makes me feel physically sick.

Nick: Although to be unfair to C.S. Lewis...these WERE the enemies to the British Isles (or the supposed future enemies) when he wrote the book. They were involved in India and the Middle East at the time he wrote Prince Caspian.

I just wish the filmmakers had decided to make the enemies, simply, HUMAN. Of all types, hues, accents, nose-shape. Narnia isn't populated by humans (except the 4 kids), so a human enemy would have been perfectly believable. Why did they have to keep C.S. Lewis's biases? (Which are particularly painful today.)

Rashed: I totally hear you.

And all my mom-writer friends here? Take this as a pass to go to the free movies or the IMAX. It's summer! No need to waste it on bad movies :)

Thanks so much for this review. I will avoid this movie for sure. Shame on them for perpetuating the racist steriotypes, and shame on any reviewer that lets it slide.

Thanks so much for this review. I will avoid this movie for sure. Shame on them for perpetuating the racist steriotypes, and shame on any reviewer that lets it slide.

Just my two cents here. I didn't think the movie was racist at all. First of all, I liked at the time that EVERYBODY had that accent. Caspian. His teacher. Nor did I find them particularly swarthy. They looked like Greeks more than anything else. And unlike movies like The Golden Compass dark-skinned people were good guys. The bad guys had black hair, the good guys had dark skin.

Violence-wise, I suppose there was a lot. But not a drop of blood (which seemed a little odd). I didn't really notice but maybe I've been deadened by movies by the Coen Bros.

Like I said, my two cents.

Betsy: Which accent? The teacher had a different accent from the rest of the crew (actually there was no one accent amongst the actors) and he was clearly 1/2 Narnian and not native to the Fortress. (They were pretty clear about that--that he was a foreigner.)

Like Nick pointed out earlier (sorry, Nick! I know you were defending Lewis here), Lewis is referring to the Crusades, so the bad guys (who I guess look Greek or Mediterranean) are dark non-Christians. Heck, they even call them BARBARIANS in the movie. (I couldn't believe they didn't cut that--might as well have called them Infidels.)

And, I don't think it's an accident that the actor chosen to play Caspian was the lightest of all the Fortress's residents, excepting the foreign professor. Caspian also is saved voluntarily at the end.

As you can see, Betsy, I may be reading into this movie too much, or I may have been expecting the racism and, therefore, wasn't disappointed :)