Prince Caspian and the absence of God

I watched Prince Caspian over the weekend - the latest installment in C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia - and am a bit hard pressed as to why this would be considered a movie that has Christian themes. Yes there is the theme of theodicy expressed in everyone's (except Lucy of course) ability to see Aslan which seems like a pertinent one to cover in our time. But I must say I found it rather disturbing that in the absence of God's (Aslan's) presence the main activity of the film is all the children running of to kill the bad people shouting enthusiastically "for Aslan!". What kind of message is that? So I have to ask: How is Prince Caspian any more Christian than a movie about the Crusades? The film was allegedly adapted for the mores of today's audiences, but rather than possibly being a wee bit sensitive to the themes of glorifying killing in God's name, the only adaptation (other than increasing the amount of battle scenes) was to let the girls kill people now too along with the boys. Yippie!

What seems to be lacking here is the complexity and seduction of evil that was present in the first film in the betrayal of Edmond, or the counter cultural "deeper magic" of Aslan sacrificing his life in order to overcome evil (an element that was underplayed by the way in the film adaptation of LW&W to make room for more CG war scenes). What we have here is a Narnia without "deeper magic" without the struggles of character, without the complexity of evil as something that runs through all of us, without overcoming evil with grace and self-sacrificing love. What we are left with, as one reviewer puts it is "a movie about kids who go into another world and dimension and spend the whole time killing people."

I would have loved to see a film that dealt seriously with the consequences of a world where God is absent. There was real potential here to draw out some profound themes. But what we get instead is your typical shallow popcorn action film made just a little bit more crass by having children doing the killing and doing it "for Aslan!"