This works out for her pretty well when trouble in the old land brews and the siblings are dramatically hauled back through time and space to the land they miss so much. Temporal progression in Narnia, though, is as relative as a child’s imagination. Just as a day at the beach can spin past in a mere moment, their year in the dinge of 1940s London has seen over 1,300 years go by in their lost kingdom, and things have changed. They find their previously glorious castle a crumbling ruin. The bears attack instead of talk and the trees refuse to dance. It seems that in the absence of beneficent rulers, encroaching armies of slavish, land-grubbing humans have invaded, driving its mystical inhabitants, flora and fauna alike, to near extinction.

What’s worse, the famed lion Aslan, their reigning totem of wisdom and omnipotence, has also apparently forsaken them, vanishing from the land and leaving them to fend for their defenseless, furry selves. The whole Narnian melting pot of legendary beasties, including dwarves, centaurs, griffins, minotaurs (still waiting to catch a sasquatch or a chupacabra in the background) and a whole safari’s worth of talking animals, have been ethnically cleansed back into the mythology of the wilds from whence they came.

Some resentment is to be expected, certainly, and is given voice in the diminutive if substantial presence of a hairy, bitter, little dwarf named Trumpkin, played to the nines by the world’s angriest little person, Peter Dinklage. The Dink runs rings around the fish-lipped siblings, spewing acid-tongued one-liners at them like Nietzsche at Easter dinner. The relish he brings to his heavily made-up role serves as a stinging counterpoint to the dreary flat-line of the other performers.

Which brings us—heavy sigh—to the Prince. You may recall the young British thespian Ben Barnes as the wishy-washy leading boy in last year’s fantasy misfire, “Stardust.” He brings a certain degree of angular Calvin Klein swoon to the table as the rightful heir to the Narnia crown, driven out of his castle by his seething, usurping uncle. But his performance never rises above his flowing locks and an overwrought Inigo Montoya impression. When he actually delivers the line, “You keeled my phather” the mind reels, attempting to avoid filling in the rest of the sentence with, “Prepare to die!”

The wet cardboard quality of Barnes’ reading is only compounded by his milquetoast nemesis, Miraz, custodian and coveter of the kingdom. In future attempts to produce more believable seething, usurping uncles, Disney might want to revisit the work of Jeremy Irons’ as Scar from its own “The Lion King.” That cartoon lion had more menace in one gnarly claw than Miraz has in a whole movie. Among other unkingly shortcomings, he gets his tub soundly thumped in single handed combat against a hotheaded teenage whelp—who, to add insult to incredulity, we’ve formerly witnessed getting the tar beat out of him by a few two-bit London hoodlums. A fabulously icy and all too brief cameo by Tilda Swinton as The White Witch from the first film serves only to underscore how far down the food chain we’ve been dragged. Miraz may be corrupt, but The White Witch was corruption, and the difference is positively exponential.

Someone should inform director Andrew Adamson that when given a mandate to deliver a PG-rated fantasy film—which he was by the “Chronicles” trustees—the term “bloodless” need be applied only to the combat sequences (which sword swinging aficionados will be happy to hear comprise a good half of the screen time in “Caspian”) and not the entire story. He’s gone on record saying that “Prince Caspian” was his least favorite of all C.S. Lewis’ seven Narnia books. Now, no doubt at the insistence of Disney’s publicity department, he has madly backpedaled on the statement, but his lack of enthusiasm for the story and faith in the material is dreadfully palpable onscreen.

To be fair, where “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” was concerned mostly with the breathless youthful discovery of potential, imagination and wonder, at its core, “Caspian” describes exactly that paradise lost. After the epic failure of last year’s “The Golden Compass,” fantasy films predicated on inquiries of faith and theology are walking a very thin line. But there’s no escaping the theological undertones of Lewis’ works. This story very specifically, even boldly, questions what connection wonder and magic could hold in a world so devoid of faith and belief. Adamson’s translation might have succeeded better if his attempt to illustrate the divide hadn’t so precipitously, even ironically, fallen directly into it.