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jumping a thousand years into the future and finding that you've become a legend. It's just cool.) Narnia has now been overtaken by an imperialist Spanish race called Telmarines, who have driven all the magical creatures and talking animals into hiding in the dark woods.
The rightful Telmarine heir to the throne is Prince Caspian (dashing newcomer Ben Barnes), but when his power-hungry uncle Miraz (Sergio Castellitto) orders his assassination, Caspian barely escapes into the forest. There, he discovers the creatures in hiding, and realizes he needs to lead them in a battle against the Telmarines in order to restore Narnia to the magical, peaceful place it used to be. For help, he blows a magical horn that's supposed to call back the Narnia kings and queens of old, and the four Pevensies come tumbling back.
In the novel, all that back story is somewhat clumsily dumped in a few chapters after the Pevensies return. In the movie, it's structured a lot more logically (and cinematically), starting with the Caspian assassination attempt before the title sequence, and then inter-cutting until the stories finally connect. When they do, one of the pleasures is that the Pevensie siblings aren't wide-eyed young kids anymore; they're seasoned veterans who, despite their appearance as mere children, immediately want to take charge. All four actors – William Moseley as Peter, Anna Popplewell as Susan, Skandar Keynes as Edmund, and Georgie Henley as Lucy – look markedly older (it's been two and a half years since they filmed the last one), but have matured surprisingly gracefully, and their performances are smoother and more confident this time around.
The movie is being marketed as a darker, more action-packed sequel, and it's true on the latter count – the action here is much more ingrained in the story, and includes a thrilling stealth assault on the Telmarine castle at the midpoint. However, thematically speaking, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is actually the darker of the two stories. Caspian plays out much more like a straightforward medieval war movie – a race of imperialist humans, greedy and vain as some of them may be, do not make for the otherworldly dread of the deceptively charming White Witch, basically the embodiment of evil. (She does make a brief cameo appearance here, still played by Tilda Swinton, and it's a terrific scene.)
Still, the contrast between the two types of villains is refreshing in the sense that we're really getting a totally different story here instead of just a retread of the first one. Of course, much of the credit for that in particular goes to C.S. Lewis.
The one major thing
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