A few weeks ago, I got to see a preview screening of Prince Caspian, which is out in the UK on 26th June, courtesy of Christian charity Care for the Family. Here are my thoughts on the film – I’ll try not to give too much away.

First off, it is a very entertaining film, which sweeps you up in the story. As you’d expect from Hollywood, the visuals and the action sequences are very accomplished. Even the child actors are pretty good. I’d definitely recommend the film.

However, the film is blighted by many of the usual mistakes Hollywood makes with sequels, and also with book adaptations. Fortunately the Narnia films have escaped being “updated” to modern day America (a fate which sadly befell the film of The Dark is Rising), and we were spared the traversty of an American Edmund asking the White Witch for burger and fries rather than Turkish Delight, as was the case at one point during The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’s long gestation period in Development Hell. But the grubby fingerprints of conventional media wisdom can be seen on this film.

Rule Number One that Prince Caspian keeps to is the deluded belief that “Sequels Must Be Darker”. Right from the opening shots of the film, as Caspian flees for his life into the night, it’s obvious that this sequel is meant to be “Dark”. Film-makers often make the mistake of thinking that Darkness is necessarily a good thing, and that each successive sequel must get progressively grimmer.

This is all a load of nonsense, of course, as anyone who has seen Spider-Man 3 will have realised. The voiceovers in the trailers intoned solemnly that “Every hero must face the darkness within”, and Peter Parker even got a “cool” black suit just so we got the point. But he wasn’t so much evil as emo, and the film proved the silliest of the franchise, and forgot that one of the crucial ingredients that made the first film so appealing was the sense of fun, the thrill we had as we shared Peter’s joy at soaring across the skyscrapers of New York.

Part of the appeal of the Narnia books is that they aren’t ponderous epics like Lord of the Rings, but fun children’s adventure stories. Which brings me on to Rule Number Two: “All Fantasy Films Must Have Vast CGI Armies Slogging It Out, Or the Viewers Will Lose Interest”. Attempting to ape the Lord of the Rings trilogy misses the point. The battles are all very well done, and also show some originality in the strategies used. But for my money, the simple single-combat swordfight, which fortunately makes it intact into the film, is far more compelling and effective than the sum total of an infinte number of mouse clicks.

Hollywood Rule Number Three is “There Must Be a Romantic Subplot”. Please, no! It’s completely out of place, and also gives rise to a couple of completely jarring and anachronous lines, including a joke on “Call me”. Stop it, stop it now.

This film makes a lot more changes to the story than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The book had a rather unusual structure, with the Pensevie children arriving half-way through the action and having to be told by Trumpkin the story so far of Prince Caspian, and the film straightens it out into something more conventional, which is probably a good idea.

But there’s also a lot less of Aslan, who is less central to the film, and a lot less of the pagan gods and spirits that populated C S Lewis’s Narnia, making it a rather less interesting place. There are also some unnecessary and irritating small changes that fly in the face of some of C S Lewis’s Christian themes.

So a good film, but with a number of flaws. It’s like seeing a great painting a child has thought they can improve on with their crayons, and has left a number of distracting marks and muddy fingerprints. But you can still see a pretty fine picture beneath.