Spectacular premiere for a more savage Narnia

They had billed it as the biggest ever audience for a London film premiere, in front of the largest cinema screen in Europe. And on the night, it didn't disappoint.

Liam Neeson, David Walliams and the film's young British star Ben Barnes joined almost 10,000 others at the O2 for the screening of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, in a production that Neeson's wife Natasha Richardson likened to the Oscars.

That's taking it too far, but the Greenwich peninsula has probably never looked so good. In the evening sunshine, the masses traipsed up the red carpet, through a gateway to Narnia, while soldiers fought on the sidelines and horsemen jostled for position.

As O2 novices, we found inside even more impressive. If you're used to watching films in London with a few dozen people in a dungeon of a room, then this is a completely new experience. As the Telmarine army thundered across the plains in the final battle, the 50,000-watt sound system seemed to shake the arena floor itself.

So what of the film, this much awaited sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

"You may find Narnia a more savage place than you remember,'" the four Pevensie children are warned, when they find themselves back in the land they once ruled, 1300 years on. And indeed it is a darkerworld. The brothers do a lot more fighting, while the eldest girl Susan emerges as a Lara Croft acolyte, a sullen arrow-slinging machine with pillow lips who inevitably falls for Prince Caspian, played by Ben Barnes with a dodgy Spanish accent.

But it is never overtly violent. As I put the younger one to bed last night, she told me she was not going to have scary dreams, a testament to the humour and visual pace of the film.

CS Lewis purists may not approve, but Prince Caspian is more Disneyfied than its predecessor. The computer-generated imagery content has gone into overdrive, with 1,500 special effects, and the character who gets the biggest laughs is Eddie Izzard's mouse Reepicheep, blatantly modelled on Antonio Banderas's Puss in Boots in Shrek II.

At two hours and 20 minutes I felt it was too long, but our eight- and six-year-olds were glued to the screen hours past their bedtime and joined in no fewer than nine outbreaks of spontaneous applause as the film reached its finale.

This children's tale of courage and chivalry is destined to do well at the box office, but yesterday it was forced to share the limelight with the other star of the night - the O2 as a venue for film premieres.

If the original Dome was a proverbial dreary old wardrobe, then the O2 has emerged from it as a 21st century entertainment centre full of Narnia-like possibilities. Shame it's so goddamn far away, or I'd say Leicester Square beware.