A touching fairy tale, but not for the young audience

Rating: 7/10 (5 February 2007)

It turns out that the lascivious Greek half-goat deity plays only a minor role in this movie. The name, posters and trailers all underlined its fantasy part, but you'll mostly be disappointed if you expect something like the Lord of the rings trilogy. In fact, even with all these fantasy elements ripped off, it would still be a meaningful war drama.
I'm not quite with the hype on this movie. I think an objective rating should be somewhere between 7 and 7.5, but definitely not the current 8.5 on IMDb. The good part is the vivid contrast between the cruel adult world and the fairy land which only exists for the innocent. The even better part is the ambiguous interpretations from various hints and charades masterfully intertwined together by the director. However the shortcoming comes directly from these same merits: the excessive violence and dark humanity make the fairy-tale elements seems superfluous for an adult watcher, while the allegorical cinematography is obviously too hard for the younger audience.
There is some heavy debate going on about whether the fantasy world was real or the poor little girl just imagined it up. Real-fantasy supporters backed their theory up with otherwise-hard-to-explain details such as the restorative effect of the magical root, the escape of Ofelia from the guarded room to reach her brother, the oracular nature of the magic book, and the blossom as well as the narrator's lines at the final scene. On the other hand, day-dreaming theorists dismissed above claims as insubstantial, because if one can make up stuffs as large as a satyr's labyrinth, how difficult it could be to invent all these puny details?
Such indeterminate nature leads me to think about another alternative. Namely, What if the fantasy is real, and the "real world" stuff is all from Ofelia's imagination? It's possible to put the whole story in a theory that Ofelia is indeed living in the fairy under-land, she imagined the life of mortals because she craved for it. The sole purpose she made up this detailed reality-tale is to impress herself.
Well, I don't really meant to confuse things up, my point is that it is really hard to tell what is real or not from what you've been shown. Let me quote a reader's opinion on this issue: "We can debate this until the fairies fly home, but in the end one of the beauties of this film is its ambiguity. Guillermo has his own ideas about the reality/fantasy thing, but he has left the film open to interpretation. His own personal view is that it was real ... but he lets you all make up your own minds."
Some final comments: Ivana Baquero is a true nymphet. With all the slenderness and feline beauty only found in girls just before adolescence, she is the crowned successor of the princesshood left vacant for more than a decade since Natalie Portman's unforgettable portrayal of Mathilda in Leon.