I am probably in the minority here, and I realize that.

I was originally under the impression that it was a fantasy movie, sort of in the vein of Labyrinth, Willow or Legend. Then I was under the impression that it was a movie about blurring those lines between fantasy and reality. I'm left feeling like it wasn't a faerie tale, and it wasn't religious and it wasn't historical, and it sort of needed to define itself.

If it was a fable, it wasn't a good one, because the "moral of the story" kept changing- it could've been about faith, but the last test was to not have faith, so that's not it.

There were too many stories crammed into the movie, and they didn't feel cohesive to me. It sort of felt like they were all neglected; like they didn't have enough time to get to any of them completely.

I would've preferred more focus on the fantasy aspect, obviously. I would have been happy, though, if any one aspect had been central, rather than all of them seeming peripheral.

Also, looking at it from a historical standpoint- from what I understand, there were no good guys in that war, so I felt a little uncomfortable with how sympathetic the "outlaws" were made to be. (Isn't that essentially Stalin's camp?) I appreciate how unflinching and stark the film was about it, but it seemed like it was mis-represented a little bit, perhaps.

Finally, since I'm not in a place where I can coherently express myself, I have a teensy bone to pick.

That awesome, awesome scene for her second task? The guy with his eyes in his hands? That pissed me off. This chick crawls into the belly of a tree, with bugs crawling all over her, to look for some toad and feed some rocks to, just because the faun told her to. But when he makes it really clear that the one thing she can't do while she's in the second task is eat, she falters? It's not like she's starving. Her family is well taken care of on that front. And it's not like she's never read a faerie tale! She's obsessed with them! So she should freaking know better! But she still eats! That was so infuriating to me. At least there could have been some clever trap for her to walk into, but it was just straightforward. "Ho-hum. I think I'll pluck some dinner off this table where this freaky guy is sitting with his eyeballs on the plate... mmm." No. Not believable. That girl knows better. Anyway, I'm going to end this here. Heh.