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And Kirk Honeycutt (The Hollywood Reporter) says, "What is lightly sketched in the novel, where much is left to the imagination, blossoms into full-blown, richly detailed life in the movie."

But Nick Schager (Slant) rants, "Despite Adamson and his three fellow screenwriters' thorough attempts to whitewash the story's more religious features, the film still never manages to fully escape its roots as a spiritual parable." (Schager does not go on to explain why he would want a film to sever itself from the roots that enriched it with such lasting significance in the first place.)

Schager continues, "And the devout … will find significant Christian undercurrents to latch onto, primarily because Lewis's narrative was a model of unsubtle New Testament symbolism. … To say that it's all more than a bit simplistic and heavy-handed would be a severe understatement. But there's no denying the unintentional hilarity of Aslan's overwrought death scene, in which he's bound, shaved, mocked by a screaming mob, and killed in some sort of surreal anthropomorphic PG version of The Passion of the Christ."

Hilarity? Indeed, the film has some shortcomings, but Schager might be the only critic who finds Aslan's death "hilarious."

Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian) stands up for the film: "It unfolds the slim book into a rich visual experience that is bold and spectacular and sweeping, while retaining its human intimacies. I can't see how it could be done better. Perhaps Mel Gibson would have preferred Aslan to be whipped with barbed wire for 30 minutes before the main event, but Adamson handles it with finesse."

But in the same publication, Polly Toynbee turned in what has become the most widespread review of the film—an elaborate expression of hatred for the Christian faith. Regarding Aslan's redemptive act, she writes, "It does not make any more sense in C.S. Lewis's tale than in the gospels. … Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart." She calls Aslan "an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging and there is no other place yet to come.… Everyone needs ghosts, spirits, marvels and poetic imaginings, but we can do well without an Aslan."

Meanwhile, Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times) praises the movie: "This is a film situated precisely on the dividing line between traditional family entertainment and the newer action-oriented family films. It is charming and scary in about equal measure, and confident for the first two acts that it can be wonderful without having to hammer us into enjoying it, or else."

A ready-to-download Movie Discussion Guide related to this movie is available at ChristianityTodayMoviesStore.com. Use this guide after the movie to help you and your small group better connect your faith to pop culture.

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