Is it subtle? Or just muddled. I'm going with 'muddled.'

Rating: 2/10 (4 March 2006)

Given all the hype surrounding Princess M., I expected to like this film a good deal more than I did.
I tried to like it. Truly. Unfortunately, the producers make it extremely difficult to do so, since their primary conceit seems to have been: "let's confuse our audience as much as we can." The primary way they accomplish this is by having every character vacillate back and forth from protagonist to antagonist every other scene. The wolves are good guys. No, wait, they're threatening to kill the hero. Oh wait, they're trying to save the forest. Nope, they're just small-minded bigots. etc. etc.
Worse than the mythic figures were the humans: ah, the people of IronTown are attacked by wolves, goodie! Oh wait, they're destroying the environment, I hate those guys! But wait, they're not as bad as these soldiers, so we sympathize again, only now they're shooting at the Princess of the forest, darn they're bad, but wait...
And so on and so on. I recognize the desire to present complex characterizations and avoid the black-and-white mentality of so much fantasy work, but this quickly devolved into simple inconsistency. Eventually I just gave up and decided to hate everybody in the film, after which it became kind of bitter fun to watch them spill one another's blood across the screen (which they do in simply astonishing volumes).
As for the environmental sub-text of the movie, it was not only severely undercut by all the heavy-handed side-switching mentioned above, but almost entirely buried in the morass of annoying mythological background which plagued the movie. In the last fifteen minutes, it turns out that this mythological stuff has actually been the whole crux of the movie (surprise), providing the excuse for a boatload of visual effects but leaving the central plot, as it has been heretofore presented, in the dust.
Final words: confusing, inconsistent, turgid mythology punctuated by inadequately explained violence. Go read Harry Potter instead.