Movies and monsters and stuff

Erin has finally posted about Prince Caspian. I'll leave the coherent summarizing to her.

Overall, despite what I am about to say, it was a good movie. It had proper Narnian talking mice, which is always good. It had that cool line about how Aslan seems to grow as you grow.

But did it have to have so much fighting?

I was surprised by how much the violence bothered me. It wasn't just the sheer violence itself--it was the complete and utter inappropriateness of it, especially in a story that everyone is going to think is supposed to be Christian. I am not, not, not playing the "just war checklist" game today, but really, it's impossible to even begin to justify violence that serves no purpose at all and we all know could have been avoided. You don't have to argue about the meaning and limits of "last resort" here. I jolly well know it wasn't a last resort scenario because I read the book, darn it!.

Actually (and Erin hinted at this), it's not a terribly bad illustration of an interesting point. Apart from Christ, and apart from Christ's body, the church, no one is capable of waging a "just" war. In order to have a truly just war, you've got to have people who are formed in a certain way, because seriously, no one is going to sit down in the middle of a heated battle and think things out. It has to be part of who you are.

In Narnia terms, this means that trying to do things without Aslan is bound to result in horrible abuses. Peter can't be the proper High King of Narnia again until he is reconciled with Aslan. Before that, he's just a kid trying too hard to act like an adult (leading the party in the wrong direction, stubbornly insisting he knows the right way). After that scene, he's King Peter again. So actually, in an odd way, the movie people got something right. The logical implication of moving the Aslan scenes to the end is that Peter would in fact mess up and act like an arrogant young idiot the whole time.

What irks me is the apparent assumption that this way is more dramatic. Bah!

And, of course, it's difficult to do the proper and interestingly dramatic character development with Caspian when he is clearly already old enough to be a fine King Caspian for Dawn Treader. The irony is that Caspian in the book would make an excellent match for Susan in the movie.

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On the other hand, the violence in the new Indiana Jones movie did not particularly bother me (at least, it wasn't the same sort of visceral reaction). It's Indiana Jones. You know what you're getting into. There will be fist fights. There will be dramatic crashing around in vehicles. There will be guns, usually wielded by Nazis--oops, I mean Communists, or whatever. (This is Indiana Jones. It is not supposed to be PC.) I will be slightly bored during the really extended action sequences. But no one will really get hurt, not even when eaten alive by giant and unnecessarily graphic ants, because no one is claiming that this is in any way relevant to real life.

That said...what's with the cutesy animal sequences?

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P.S. Dalek Dave totally agrees with me in every way. He'll tell you all about it as soon as he's done taking over the world.