The family and I went to see the latest movie installment of C.S. Lewis’ Narnian Chronicles — Prince Caspian — last Friday night, and it’s a great movie. The story line doesn’t follow the book very well, but with a few exceptions the movie does follow the book at least in spirit.

One of the things in the movie that puzzled me and left me discussing it with the boys long after the credits rolled was the catapults that were used by the Telmarines in the attack on Aslan’s How. These catapults were marvelous machines, able to hurl stone balls great distances at a very rapid pace. Each had a rotating arm with a throwing basket at each end, and they were throwing two stones for each revolution.

The one problem I could see with them is that there’s no way they could work as they were depicted in the movie.

From the brief glimpses given of the machines, there were maybe a dozen men operating each one with the stones loading from a wagon pushed up behind each machine. There didn’t appear to be any mechanism for keeping the arm rotating other than some kind of chain or belt driven by something at the base. You couldn’t tell at all what was driving it…

But I guess with all the magical inter-world travel, the fauns, the centaurs, the talking animals, etc… it must be magic that was making it go.