I meant to write a review of the new Prince Caspian movie last week when it was actually, you know, new. By now my review would be old news, but I’ll offer a few remarks anyway because it’s good material for a larger theme that’s close to my heart: why do moviemakers have to botch adventure stories so badly these days?

A few days after seeing Prince Caspian, we went to see the new Indiana Jones movie. It was fun. Not quite Raiders of the Lost Ark good, but pretty good. I can enjoy a good shoot ‘em up popcorn movie just as well as the next guy (or girl) — what I don’t understand is why every story involving shooting (or jabbing, as the case may be) must be turned into an Indiana Jones-level popcorn movie. Fluffy and feel-good action adventure is all right some of the time, but adventure stories can also be more than that. In Hollywood there seems to be an unspoken law that they can’t be.

In the case of Prince Caspian what you really have is a classic children’s adventure story that could have made a great children’s movie. Instead, it became a pretty mediocre movie, all because some idiot thought it necessary to “improve” what decades’ worth of kids had already obviously seen to be good. The film opens with (surprise) a suspenseful and action-packed scene in which Prince Caspian is fleeing the castle where he was raised, following the birth of a son to his usurper uncle Miraz. I was perplexed by this… I recognized the scene well enough, but it occurs a hundred pages or more into the book, and is preceded by a large number of other critical scenes. “Huh,” I thought. “I guess they decided to do all of that by flashback.”

Wrong! The decided to cut it all entirely! Apparently the talks between Caspian and his teacher about Old Narnia and the development of the relationship between Caspian and his uncle were all too boring to be worth showing. And actually, this was the beginning of a trend, because almost all the scenes involving dialogue, characterization, comic relief, and the development of deeper spiritual themes, were apparently too boring to picture. What we did get instead were battles. Lots and lots of battles. Multiple gratuitous battle scenes that corresponded to nothing at all in the book. Spontaneous duels between characters who were supposed to be close companions. Calm, friendly conversations transformed into shouting matches. Prince Caspian is, undoubtedly, the most militaristic of the seven Narnia books, but much of this film felt more like a kung fu movie than an adventure story. “If this is a movie for children,” wrote reviewer Robert Knight, “then I guess the filmmakers had Donald Rumsfeld’s grandkids in mind when they made it.”

Oh, but actually, I misspoke. The movie wasn’t all about fighting. They also added in a romance between Prince Caspian and Susan. Super.

After Peter Jackson mangled one of the greatest fantasy stories of all time into a barely-recognizable modernist monstrosity, I used to get into arguments with people who tried to justify Jackson with the claim, “but he had to cut things, because the books were too long.” This is hogwash, of course. You only get to use that as an excuse for cutting things when you haven’t added scores of pointless, totally gratuitous ones. I wasn’t bothered by the cutting of Tom Bombadil; actually I was glad that he never came into it because that was one character at least that Jackson couldn’t butcher. I was bothered by the fact that almost all Tolkien’s beautiful dialogue was replaced by short, hackneyed exchanges that left the characters flat and the story convoluted. Depth was consistently traded for cheap, cliched thrills of a sort that I’m sure would have had Tolkien himself shaking his head in disgust. Did I mention that I never actually saw the second and third movies? After the first excruciating installment I had seen all I wanted to see.

In the case of Prince Caspian, even the pathetic length excuse can’t be used because the book is a mere 150 pages or so — just about the perfect length for a film. I wouldn’t have blamed them too harshly for taking out one or two of the more surreal sections — it would have been hard, for example, to really capture the revelries of Bacchus, or Aslan’s wild trip through the towns of the Telmarines. But there was absolutely no reason for giving the story such a complete makeover, and in fact, the plot we were left with really didn’t make a lot of sense. Why did the Telmarine soldiers take Trumpkin the dwarf all the way to the other side of Narnia just to execute him? How did he know who the children were, or where they should be taken, given that he had never personally even met Caspian or learned anything about his plans? Beloved characters like Dr. Cornelius and Reepicheep are never even identified by name, and needless to say the story’s deeper spiritual themes (Prince Caspian is in large part a book about skepticism being conquered by religious faith) are almost wholly lost.

There is a very simple solution to all these problems. Just do it like he wrote it. The books are delightful as they are, and there is absolutely no reason why they couldn’t just make a movie that’s faithful to the story. You won’t have to spend too much time on the script, because guess what? The dialogue is already written! Once upon a time, filmmakers were obliged to tweak things, particularly in fantasy stories, to compensate for the difficulty of recreating certain things on film. Special effects have come a long way in the last decade or two, and these days they can do a very nice job of capturing visually spectacular things, but in many ways this actually seems to have made movies worse. The special effects, instead of enhancing an already-wonderful story, take over adventure movies completely leaving us with flat characters and paper-thin plots. I’ve seen this enough times by now that I have to ask: why does this need to happen?

Part of it is something that I, as the wife of a techie blogger, can understand. Boys like to use their toys. When the special effects people figure out how to do something spectacular-looking, they naturally look for ways to put it in their newest movie. Sometimes that means that the effects start steering the plot more than the other way around.

I really think, though, that there’s something deeper going on here. It’s clear that it is possible to make a movie faithful to a book. It happens occasionally with Jane Austen or EM Forester books. That this doesn’t happen with adventure stories seems to reflect a kind of anti-fantasy bigotry; filmmakers somehow don’t think they have to treat it as literature. This is utterly foolish, of course. Just because The Lord of the Rings involves wizards and is incredibly fun to read, doesn’t mean it isn’t real literature. Why would anyone be so ridiculous as to think that? There are many cultures for whom myths and adventure stories have been a very serious business indeed, and often the medium by which important lessons are taught. Why is it so difficult for ours to understand that adventure stories aren’t necessarily a form of escapism, and that the fantasy setting can sometimes be the perfect vehicle for communicating vital truths?

It seems to me that the answer must relate to the virtues that are best exemplified in fantasy, and in our society’s relationship to them. A work like Tolkien’s celebrates many virtues and spiritual goods, but prominent among them are those related to the spirited part of the soul — courage, honor, faithfulness until death, and so forth. As has become more and more clear to me, these are gradually vanishing from our society. They have become something of an embarrassment to modern people; the best name you can find for them is “old-fashioned” but there are also more damning names — “triumphalist”, “chauvinist” or even “bigoted.” The problem is that the spirited goods are predicated on having some understanding of the truth, and especially on developing the right sorts of natural affections. Our culture largely doesn’t believe in natural affections, and we’re pretty dubious about truth. So it’s no surprise that the spiritual goods, which take truth and natural affection for granted, should come to be viewed with some measure of embarrassment or, more likely, derision.

And yet, even in a benighted time like ours, the human soul is still made in God’s image. It is difficult to disfigure it so completely that it cannot see something appealing in strong men and honorable women, and people who sacrifice their loves and their lives so that the good may triumph. As these things become more and more lost to us in our actual lives, we develop a kind of craving for them that our own spiritual resources cannot satisfy. Then our capitalist, consumer culture comes to the rescue. Providers of entertainment (from filmmakers to video game makers to designers of theme parks) pick up on this hunger and spin out a variety of low-level entertainments, allowing us to feel like heroes in mediums that are sufficiently removed from reality as not to be offensive or “dangerous.” We don’t raise our sons to be men of honor, but we let them satisfy that urge a bit by killing Nazis or aliens on their X-boxes. We don’t teach our daughters to be true and faithful, but we let them enjoy stories about beautiful princesses and knights in shining armor — not forgetting to warn them, of course, that this is just romantic fancy, which maturity will teach them to disregard. In this sort of climate, it shouldn’t surprise us to find that even the best and noblest of fantasy stories gets translated into smutty, action-packed fluff when they decide to put it on screen.

Think we could talk Mel Gibson into taking over the rest of the Narnia series?