JohnCalvinYoung.com

After yesterday’s post about the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where I men­tioned Prince Caspian’s dis­as­trous devi­a­tion from the orig­i­nal story, I real­ized I had never posted this arti­cle I wrote shortly after see­ing the film on the the­matic struc­ture and motifs of Prince Caspian. (I inten­tion­ally did not com­ment on the inter­po­lated romance between Caspian and Susan, which I con­sider to be extremely dis­tract­ing and dam­ag­ing to the film as a whole and pos­si­bly the franchise.)

We Are All Minotaurs

Last week I went open­ing night with three of my broth­ers to see the new Chronicles of Narnia film, Prince Caspian. The film does not fol­low the book really closely, but it did do some things very well, and it set me think­ing. Before I watched the film, I had always thought of Prince Caspian as a rather point­less  book. It wasn’t a grand alle­gory like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or The Last Battle, but it didn’t have a par­tic­u­lar theme of its own like Dawn Treader or The Silver Chair—or so I thought. Although they dis­carded mas­sive chunks of the book when mak­ing the film, the film­mak­ers retained every line of the dia­logue that dealt with the spir­i­tual side of the story, empha­siz­ing the the­matic and alle­gor­i­cal ele­ments that made it what it was. As the film closed I was amazed—they hadn’t added any­thing to the famil­iar lines from the book (in that par­tic­u­lar realm), but they had drawn out a theme which I hadn’t really seen as inte­gral to the story.

It really dawned on me when Lucy finally meets Aslan—when towards the end, she talks to him at last. Aslan asks her, “Little One, why didn’t you come to me?” She answers, “But…but—the oth­ers wouldn’t believe! They wouldn’t lis­ten to me!” “Yes, I know, but why didn’t you come?”She looks down, and with a catch in her voice admits, “I-I guess I was scared. But-but Aslan?!–if I had come when I saw you, would the oth­ers be dead?” “Lucy, how many times have I told you that you can­not know what would have been? But what will be—that is a dif­fer­ent mat­ter!” I real­ized that that was the true mean­ing, the real theme of the story—that some­times we have to take things on faith, and not waver—that Caspian had to trust the Professor, trust that the horn would bring help, trust that the chil­dren and then Aslan would truly help him. Peter, Susan, Edmund and not least Lucy had to place their faith implic­itly in Aslan, even when it looked like they had been pulled into Narnia only to die. They needed to fol­low him, even when it looked like he was lead­ing them over a precipice to their doom. When things looked dark­est, they had to take it on faith that Aslan would save them, that they were to be found fight­ing for the cause when he came. This theme was brought out pow­er­fully through­out the movie, result­ing in per­haps an even more the­matic film than book.

When I was sit­ting there putting all the pieces of the puz­zle together, I remem­bered a strange detail I had noted ear­lier in the film. There were Minotaurs fight­ing along­side Centaurs and Fauns in Caspian’s army! In the book, there were rem­nants of both good and bad Narnia in the for­est, and they had joined forces orig­i­nally, but the evil ele­ments were soon found to be unable to work along­side the good. True, that hap­pened in the movie, but the Minotaurs were not involved in the mutiny. I sud­denly real­ized that the film­mak­ers, in trans­form­ing the story for the sil­ver screen, had cre­ated a very inter­est­ing visual metaphor in the par­tic­i­pa­tion of the Minotaurs in Caspian’s army. One Minotaur had even been high­lighted, when in one bat­tle, a gate is dropped behind much of the army and a Minotaur throws him­self beneath it, brac­ing him­self to hold it up and allow his com­rades to escape. Even when gut-shot by one of Miraz’s archers, he stood there long enough for most of the army to escape. Something seemed strange here. Thinking back, what were the most vis­i­ble mem­bers of the Witch’s army in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? The Minotaurs, of course! And yet here they were, fight­ing and dying for the right side this time. How could that be? They didn’t deserve it! It was then I real­ized that the themes of redemp­tion, repen­tance, and sal­va­tion were only strength­ened by this motif. The Minotaurs were unspeak­ably evil, in fact the very sym­bols of the dark army, but after the death of the Son they too were offered grace. Now, despite their her­itage, they had the priv­i­lege of fight­ing in the King’s army, and giv­ing their lives for Him. The alle­gory dawned on me—what are we but Minotaurs in the cos­mic sense? We are the “unspeak­ably evil” ones, the ones whose kin­dred were present and par­tic­i­pated in the death of the Creator’s Son. Yet we had been offered free grace, and we were the ones who should be awed to be asked to give our for­tunes or our lives in the King’s ser­vice. Truly we too have more to appre­ci­ate than any other. We are all Minotaurs. We ought not to for­get it, either.

That’s how book adap­ta­tions ought to be—the film­mak­ers using the strengths of the medium to enhance and rein­force the themes of the orig­i­nal work. Not to say that the film­mak­ers did every­thing right with Prince Caspian—far from it—but that the metaphor of the redeemed Minotaurs fight­ing in the King’s army left me with a poignant image of the theme, one which left me think­ing for days. That’s the way it ought to be.