Deleted and altered scenes from Prince Caspian.
Published by violet May 19th, 2008 in Punkass!, If I have to suffer you have to suffer, MoviesRight on the heels of Marc incisively questioning the distance between progressive rhetoric and action. I bring you… movies! yaay!
I saw Prince Caspian a couple of days ago. It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t great. Mostly, it failed to make an impression on me at all beyond wondering who these people are, and why there is a movie about them. More vodka was clearly necessary.
Oh, and there were bits that irked the hell out of me, which I shall assume were just replacements for scenes that would not have irked the hell out of me. Like these! (All apologies to Maia, who does this better.)
DUMBLEDORF: Caspian, you must leave! Tonight!
CASPIAN: Are you sure? It all seems so sudden.
A bunch of soldiers come in and turn Caspian’s bed into a… highly-perforated not-bed.
CASPIAN: Right! Hasty retreat now.
CASPIAN: Will I ever see you again?
DUMBLEDORF: Oh, yes. You see, I have perfected the art of exposition—only allude, never deliver. That way, they can never kill you off!
CASPIAN: Well, you’ll probably be tortured terribly.
DUMBLEDORF: Fucksticks.
LUCY: Susan, come quickly!
SUSAN: Have they started tearing each others’ shirts off yet?
LUCY: Not… yet…
SUSAN: Call me when.
As the world is inconsiderately blowing away.
SUSAN: Everyone grab hands!
EDWARD: I’m not grabbing his hand!
PETER: That’s it, just give the slashers material. Go on, then!
LUCY: Look! Everyone! Over there! I see Aslan!
EVERYONE: We don’t.
LUCY: Well, he’s not there *now*.
AUDIENCE: Joke’s on you for turning your back on him. O! Walked right into that one, we did.
EVERYONE: Since we have evidence of and a warm and fuzzy relationship with a benevolent, Lion-shaped God who is prone to directly intervening in the affairs of the world and is named Aslan, I think we should dismiss what Lucy is saying as the ravings of a child. (A child who, incidentally, we know to have the lived experience of at least one lifetime.)
EVERYONE ELSE: Hear, hear!
AUDIENCE: We’re never going to make it to act three, are we?
PETER: Right. Well, we’ll just stick to the plan, and hundreds of people won’t die, except for the king, who will.
CASPIAN: No! I have to save the professor!
SUSAN: Lots of people… dying… we have this whole… plan…
CASPIAN: Impulsive! Irrational! Besides, he’ll be useful! He knows things.
SUSAN: What? What does he know?
CASPIAN: Didn’t say.
MIRAZ: I am evil!
CASPIAN: I really want to stab you.
SUSAN: You should do that.
PETER: Seriously.
CASPIAN: Really really want to stab you!
PETER: We’re here for you mate.
SUSAN: It only gets easier.
CASPIAN: I just… can’t seem to…
MIRAZ: Speedy escape now!
SUSAN: Next time, I’m stabbing him.
NIKABRIK: Since Aslan’s lying in a ditch somewhere, let me suggest my… associates.
CASPIAN: Your… associates…?
NIKABRIK: Who had the power to keep even Aslan at bay! Who can deliver you to the throne, and Narnians to… freedom…
CASPIAN: Since Professor Exposition never actually told me anything, I feel oddly compelled to say yes.
* summoning! circles! ice! *
WHITE WITCH: Just one drop of Adam’s blood, and I will be free, and power over all these lands will be yoooours…
CASPIAN: Did I say yes? I meant not yes.
Peter and Miraz are dueling. To the death! And Peter almost wins!
MIRAZ: What is it, boy? Afraid to take a life?
PETER: Dude, I’ve killed like fifty people. Today. But we still have fifty mil left in our CG budget, so I’m going to leave the killing to Prince Incompetent over here.
CASPIAN: * fails *
AUDIENCE: Really?
WHITE WITCH: Peter… just a drop, Peter…
PETER: I feel oddly compelled to say yes.
Susan demonstrates the proper use of Every Direction Arrow.
SOLDIER #214: Close quarters! You’re doomed! … My face! My spleen!
Caspian rides up to see Susan surrounded by corpses.
SUSAN: What the bloody hell are you doing here? Isn’t there a war on?
CASPIAN: I’m here… to rescue… you…?
SUSAN: We are not having a romantic subplot.
LUCY: Aslan! I knew I’d find you!
ASLAN: I was never far away.
LUCY: Really? So why the hell didn’t you get your ass out of the forest and stop that army from slaughtering us, dearest?
ASLAN: Nothing happens the same way twice.
LUCY: And you already used that particular divine rescue? Fine. Turn the sky green first. Invent gunpowder and napalm. Make the entire invading army incontinent. Aren’t you omnipotent? Fuckwit.
SOLDIER #1: Oh shit! The trees! Are marching… against… huh.
SOLDIER #2: Seen this movie before?
SOLDIER #1: It’s uncanny.
The armies draw near the river.
LUCY: Liv Tyler! Now! Do it!
POSEIDON brings the pain.
LUCY: Really?
PETER: I don’t think we’re coming back.
LUCY: What? Like, never? Never ever?
PETER: You and Ed can come back. Actually, I’ll come back even though right now I’m telling you I won’t. Susan’s right out, though.
LUCY: Why?
SUSAN: Got my period.
LUCY: Oh. Off with you, then.
EDMUND: Yeah, go through the trees or whatever it is you… do.
PETER: Run along, then.
ASLAN: Slut.
My coworker thinks that I don’t like the Narnia movies because I’m a godless heathen whose ears bleed at the message of the Lord, but really it’s because Tolkien and Jackson did it better.
Great, much like Iron Man, I now have to go watch a movie I really had no intention of seeing just to participate in the conversations. *sigh*
Oh, you don’t have to. Although after watching it and reading the Wiki page, I really rather want to read The Problem of Susan again, as when I first read it, I really Didn’t Get It.
I hate that Narnia gets to have sequels and His Dark Materials sucked hard enough that it doesn’t. I blame the godbags.
Speaking of Narnia vs. His Dark Materials, this takedown of Lewis by Philip Pullman is really awesome. I’d never heard of “The Problem of Susan”, but now I want to get my hands on a copy. Keeping Susan out of Heaven and forcing her to live with the death of her entire family simply because she’s a female with a social life has got to be one of the most pernicious moments in children’s literature. (Not to mention portraying the death of every other main character as a “happy ending”.)
This post made me laugh and covers most of the groan-inducing moments of the movie. Except maybe how the moving trees take the battlefield and then the bad guys get washed away in a torrent exactly like the ents in LOTR.
I had only read the first book as a kid, so I didn’t realize that C.S. Lewis started treating his protagonists in such a callous way until the end of this movie when he just bars Peter and Susan from coming back for no real reason. It’s not like they don’t have adults in Narnia! I turned and asked my sister about this because she read all the books and she laughed at me and told me that Edmund and Lucy get kicked out after the next book and then how they all get killed in the very end, except for Susan, only her fate is worse because she doesn’t get to go to new Narnia/heaven because she’s too girly (this was how she explained it to me and though it seems the precise reason it left up to interpretation, it’s not very convincing). I don’t get it - how are we supposed to love and trust Aslan/Jesus when he keeps disposing of our main characters?? Seriously, fuck you, Aslan! I liked Susan more than you anyway, what with your deus ex machina abilites and all.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. They’re right there, and I certainly didn’t just add them because I’d forgotten and because, at that point, the vodka had come out. Certainly not.
Thanks, Violet. That’s a nice piece of literary criticism masquerading as fiction– or is it vice-versa?
Took me a minute to figure out who and what was going on in there. “Like a cat, getting the last ounce of enjoyment out of a mouse.” It’s nice how Gaiman so deftly uses C.S. Lewis’s own symbols against him.
There’s a thing Gaiman does (not to say that he’s alone in doing it, mind), where he’ll take symbols and let them roll around and grow—take a mythic event and make it solid, write the true fallout of the thing in real emotions and flesh and blood. This is why he is known as a writer of horror.
(“The Problem of Susan” gets better, of course, though I do love that excerpt.)
Heh. I’d assumed that that was the entire story. I thought Gaiman was just being commendably concise.
The Problem of Susan was the biggest reason for my excitement when Fragile Things came out. It’s brilliant.
Violet - have you read the other Narnia books? If not, well. If you liked what he did to Susan, you’ll love what he does with evil witch lady in the Silver Chair. Sigh.
It pains me to admit this, but I haven’t actually read any of them. They’re on my to-read list, vaguely, but I’m afraid I’ll have a lot of trouble seeing them as anything other than, y’know, Christian propaganda. And there are so many beautiful books that I haven’t read yet that I’m having trouble convincing myself to read some that I don’t think are beautiful, and don’t think I’ll enjoy.
You probably shouldn’t bother then, really. Life is too short.
But, all of the completely justified criticisms aside, the series does a few beautiful moments. There’s a piece in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader which has stayed with me since childhood, where one of the kids, stranded on a small island, steals a dragon’s gold bracelet and puts it on. The next time he wakes up, he finds he has been turned into a mini-dragon himself. He becomes addicted to the painful ecstasy of scratching off his own scales, only to have them each grow back thicker and larger than before. After a month or so of this, he has nearly finished the final transformation into a “real” dragon (evidently, you see, this is how all dragons were born) when he is finally rescued by his friends, who break the enchantment by cutting off the bracelet, which (still human sized on a dragon-sized arm) has long ago painfully fused around his wrist. If I’m remembering it at all correctly. Anyway, for some reason that really stuck with me.
If I’m remembering it at all correctly.
Nope, you’re not. He stays as a dragon for a month or so and no one has a clue what to do (and he doesn’t do the thing with the scales), until one night Aslan summons him to a pond, makes him claw his skin off a few times but he’s still a dragon, then claws the dragon off him entirely until he’s a boy again, at which point the armband is too big for him.
Oh really? Funny how the mind reframes things in your memory.
I’m actually a little bit disappointed. It sounds like it was just a straightforward morality tale about how the sin of greed can only be cleansed by a higher power, etc. I like the version my childhood brain left for me better. Not only I have replaced the higher power with one’s friends, but the whole idea of getting addicted to tearing off your own regrowing flesh is a whole lot kinkier!
haven’t seen Prince Caspian yet but definitely looking forward to it… i’ll have to look over the book one more time just to remind myself how the original story goes
“My coworker thinks that I don’t like the Narnia movies because I’m a godless heathen whose ears bleed at the message of the Lord, but really it’s because Tolkien and Jackson did it better.”
Tell him/her that Prince Caspian is all about beer (or more specifically, it is a subtle anti-fundamentalism allegory).