Chronicles of Narnia, The: Prince Caspian (Blu-ray)

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Video:
And boy, does that implied beheading look great in 1080p (just kidding). Actually, the AVC/MPEG-4 transfer is a good one, with no artifacts on the feature (just, strangely enough, on one of the HD extras). This film would have been killed with an overprocessed look, but that's thankfully not the case here. There's just the slightest hint of grain and an equally slight softness that makes everything look believable as an alternate world. The level of detail is particularly good, with no DNR, just strongly delineated edges to begin with. "Prince Caspian" is presented in 2.40:1 aspect ratio.

Audio:
Disney and Walden Media deliver an extremely lively and robust 7.1 channel English DTS-HD (48kHz/24-bit), with great (and more importantly, logical) distribution of sound that never draws attention to itself. And yet, at some point when you realize the clarity and pure tones of every clash of sword and zip of crossbow arrows--even footsteps on stone castle floors--you think to yourself, wow. It's one of the better soundtracks I've listened to lately. Additional audio options are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and Chinese Dolby Digital 5.1, with subtitles in English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese.

Extras:
First, while digital copies have hitherto been included at no extra charge (if you believe that), Disney has taken into account that not everyone might want a digital copy, and if you fall into that category you can pick up the 2-disc version and save yourself roughly five dollars.

On Disc 1 there's the commentary track and a "Circle-Vision Interactive: Creating the Castle feature."

On the commentary track, it's clear that Adamson allows his actors plenty of freedom to express themselves, because his five young stars who join him here interject with all sorts of remarks. There's a lively give-and-take, lots of laughs, some overlapping dialogue that's sometimes tough to decipher, but plenty of behind-the-scenes insights and anecdotes. It's a fun commentary track, in other words, with Adamson's wry humor a constant throughout (as when he deadpans at the outset, "Any good family movie should start with a birthing scene").

The Circle-Vision sounds like a Profile 1.1 feature, but it's not. Basically director Adamson introduces this feature, which is a 360-degree shot of the castle that was built over five weeks by 200 craftsmen, and on each segment there are circles to click on to access specific bonus features. There are 13 audio commentaries in all, and ten scenes to click on to access more information about the process. There's almost an hour of material here, much of it detail-oriented, but most of it fascinating.

Disc two features a three minute-blooper reel if you're into such things, a five-minute short on how long it takes Peter Dinklage to become Trumpkin (with a little yak hair added here and there), a seven-minute "Secrets of the Duel" that explains the choreography for the key battle, a five-minute snippet on animating the animals and trees, a 10-minute pre-visualization extra, an 11-minute short on how Warwick Davis becomes the dwarf Nikabrik, and 11 minutes (10, in all) of deleted scenes that aren't missed. These are fine little featurettes, but teasers, really, because of their length.

More substantial is the longest feature, "Inside Narnia: The Adventure Returns" (34 min.), which is most astounding because of all the footage not just of behind-the-scenes filming but of down time that the actors all had to go through. It's here where we get the basic story behind the movie, and how reluctant at first Adamson was to do the sequel. It deteriorates, though, into a bit of a tribute to the director near the end. In "Sets of Narnia: A Classic Comes to Life" (23 min.) we get the full story on Lewis and see pages from the original book compared to natural settings that Adamson and his crew actually found to match. Readings from the text are juxtaposed against narratives about how the filmmakers tried to recapture as faithfully as possible all of the settings that Lewis described. It's possibly my favorite of the bunch. About the same length is "Big Movie Comes to a Small Town," which feels like an extension of the previous feature because it's about a specific location--the town of Bovec, Slovenia, on the River Soca. On this small town over 1000 cast and crew descended, and since there weren't enough places for them to stay, many stayed with families in private homes. It's a great feature on the impact that a film can have on a community.

Bottom Line:
Adamson and his crew cranked it up a notch when it came to CGI and set construction, even building a castle from scratch. But character development takes a back seat this trip, and because the focus is on politics and the reclaiming of a kingdom, with inevitable battles driving much of the action, it doesn't have the same charm or magic as "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." "Prince Caspian" is still solid family entertainment, though, and just as Lewis's books were better received by children, this film series is certainly more kid-friendly than the Peter Jackson's version of Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

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