Back to Narnia with Prince Caspian: fans of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia will likely find Prince Caspian to be a visually and technically magnificent family-friendly film that misses the mark in a few areas.

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Epic fantasy is the one genre of storytelling that Hollywood has never been able to master. Before Lord of the Rings, there was a scant handful--Willow, The Princess Bride, and Ladyhawke nearly exhaust the list for the last three decades--of live-action fantasy films that even attained cinematic mediocrity. Of these, only The Princess Bride, with its quirky one-liners and odd commingling of the modern and medieval, achieved something approaching cult appeal. Until very recently, fantasy was perceived to be box-office poison ("Never act with children or dragons" goes the adage), and filmmakers stayed away from tried-and-true literary classics like the works of Tolkien and Lewis.

Then came Peter Jackson and Lord of the Rings, a film trilogy of uneven but undeniable magnificence that set the tone for a glut of new fantasy epics that tried to exploit the wizardry of computer-generated images (CGI) as Jackson's Weta Workshops had done. The Spiderwick Chronicles, Harry Potter, Eragon, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, among many others, have dazzled audiences with magical duels, CGI monsters, and computer-generated set-piece battles all cast in the mold of Jackson's Lord of the Rings. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian director Andrew Adamson is but the latest of Peter Jackson's epigones, and therein lies the problem.

The unhappy truth is that the new Narnia film is long on spectacle but fails a bit short in the substance department, especially by contrast with the original novel that gave it life.

C.S. Lewis' Prince Caspian, like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the rest of the Narnia series, is a warmhearted child's tale about faith and renewal, featuring, like most of the other books, the aloof and enigmatic lion Asian, the Christ figure in the world of Narnia. In this story, in which the four Pevensie children, Lucy, Susan, Peter, and Edmund, return to Narnia a year older and a bit more jaded, Aslan is somewhat elusive and Narnia itself changed almost beyond recognition.

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It turns out that 1,300 years have passed since the Pevensies, now the stuff of mythology and rock carvings, last frolicked with satyrs and tree spirits in Narnia's pristine glades. The magnificent palace of Cair Paravel, where Lucy and the others once reigned as monarchs, is fallen into ruin, and Narnia's original residents--talking animals, centaurs, griffins, and the like--have hidden in the deep forests, and a warlike race of humans, the Telmarines, has conquered and spoiled the land.