Two anticlimactic reviews, to be filed under “T” for tardy.

What was I saying about the Narnia movies? Oh yes. By now audiences have had ample time to accept that Walden’s contributions to the fantasy genre will be homogenized, sanitized, and above all commercialized versions of C.S. Lewis’s fragile children’s books. But once that important step is taken, one can begin to enjoy them for what they are: buttered popcorn. Fractionally less involving than its predecessor, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is still a high-class family film, though languidly paced and lacking a villain on the order of Tilda Swinton’s white witch Jadis (the very mention of which sends an appreciative quiver up the spine).

Among its virtues is a graspable depiction of a faithless Narnia in which Aslan is nowhere to be seen, a situation that lends itself to explorations of faith—specifically Christian faith—in a seemingly wicked world. The film lacks the medieval literacy of Lewis’s prose, but director Andrew Adamson occasionally stages a scene that outdoes its source in excitement. The emergence of a wolfish assassin (“I am hunger, I am thirst.”) is shudderingly effective, and the scene leading up to Aslan’s first appearance (in which the very trees fall into line in allegiance) is dreamily atmospheric.

The deeply emotional undercurrents of the story tend to get lost in a haze of overblown battle sequences, but even the most stoical of viewers are likely to feel a surge of emotion when a minotaur props up a castle gate and withstands a barrage of enemy arrows while his comrades escape. Such moments remind you of the rich thread of sacrifice woven into the Narnia narrative, a thread that will hopefully not be broken in future installments.

As prep work for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time in about ten years, and still found it exciting, although not in the places I expected. Perhaps it’s due to a shift in cinematic values, but I thrilled less to the sprawling action scenes than the ones of understated exposition (Indy explaining the function of the ark of the covenant to a couple of government suits) and of steadily growing discovery (Indy aligning his staff with the falling sunbeams to reveal a clandestine map; a gaggle of frightened diggers dusting the door to the Well of Souls).

This new movie has a few scenes like those, including a search for a magnetized coffin in an immense warehouse. What dread secret does the coffin hold? The answer to that question is less interesting than I would have wished for, although it involves interdimensional beings and buried city guarded by undead natives.

Despite bravura displays of technical razzle-dazzle, Spielberg can’t seem to get a good rhythm going. The film has a bored, dutiful feel to it, as if his heart weren’t really in it. (After all, it’s been nearly 20 years and three Academy Awards since he’s attempted this sort of thing, and he has every right to be a bit rusty.) Most of it appears so polished, airbrushed, and green-screened, there’s hardly any warmth left, let alone a warm flesh tone.

A nuclear bomb blast that leaves our hero (who ducks for cover in a lead-lined refrigerator) virtually unscathed marks the exact moment when the rough-and-tumble archaeologist becomes a cartoon. And the Indy I grew up with is not a cartoon.