Chief among the many fine memories which C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe impressed upon my tender my brain was an ever-burning question of the sort that, to a five year old, was just as significant a topic as the allegorical nature of Aslan's sacrifice or the theological connotations of the Deep Magic that binds Narnia like a natural law: what does Turkish delight taste like?

And, for that matter, what does it look like? What sort of candy could have been so good as to lure young Edmund to corruption? Were I five years old today, the answer would be a Google image search away; but back then my imagination was all the search engine I had, or needed, and it conjured for me an image of a pale pink toffee-like confection - "sweet and light to the very center," as Lewis described it. Now, however, I've seen this new film adaptation of the novel, in which the Turkish Delight (and most of the other memorable details - the mothballs in the wardrobe, for example) does indeed make it to the screen intact; I can presume that the filmmakers did their research, and that the candy depicted is, indeed, honest to goodness Turkish delight; and I have to say: it looked like it tasted better in my imagination.

So it goes. To an extent I'm very grateful that director Andrew Adamson (who prior to this directed Shrek and its sequel, the latter being one of my least-favorite films in recent memory) remained so faithful to the chronology of the text, and that his screenplay, co-written with Ann Peacock, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, takes no revisionist leaps or bounds (aside from an additional action scene with the wolves, and a bit of character development for Edmund that pays off quite nicely). I very much missed the tragic Christmas party held by the fox and the mice, and I waited in vain for an appearance by the giant Rumblebuffin, but what can you do? Such is the nature of adapting beloved literature, and just as scores of Jane Austen fans are currently up in arms over the changes made to the recent adaptation ofPride & Prejudice, there will be would-be Narnians galore distraught over this film's failure to live up to the pictures in their heads.

But subjectivity comes in degrees, and what ultimately makes an adaptation great is its ability to stand on its own, even when it departs from preconception; on that level, the film does have a handful of triumphs. Lucy and Edmund, for instance, portrayed pitch perfectly by newcomers Georgie Henley and Skandar Keynes (Edmund, in particular, comes into his own as a fully rounded character better than anyone else in the film); or Mr. and Mrs. Beaver and most of the other creatures, who through sheer delight overcome the hurdles of their artificiality. There is Tilda Swinton, beyond reproach as the immaculately dispicable White Witch.

And then, on the other hand, there is the great lion Aslan. It is the film's greatest fault that he comes across almost as a non-entity. Realized by CGI and voiced by Liam Neeson, he's a fairly majestic physical presence when he's on screen - but that's actually a relatively small amount of time, and the metaphysical import of the character is muddled. His self-sacrifice is moving but not heartbreaking; his return, a pleasant if not exactly joyous surprise. Lewis didn't give the Aslan much more face time in the book, but he was also the only overtly epic element in a novel that was was otherwise anything but: the final battle scene, which in the film is a grand clash of humans and animals and special effects, occupied about half a page in the book. How can a grave, gentle Lion command the screen when it's being occupied by rampaging centaurs, giants and polar bears? By actually opening the film during the blitzkrieg on London, the filmmakers seem to be drawing a comparison between a real war and a fanciful one - a terrific idea, but Aslan's place between them is uncertain. I wish a few historical elements from some of the subsequent books had been culled for the sake of this film's mythological texture.

As for Aslan's Christological nature, there are no two ways around it: Lewis wrote the book as a Christian allegory, with Aslan as an explicit savior figure, and the film preserves that perspective. It is no more explicit or implicit than it is in the book; nor is it more overt than any other fantasy tale that plays upon the mythic stereotype distilled by Campbell, with the difference that, unlike George Lucas or J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis' biblical undertones are intentional. Because they are undertones, I'd cry foul if anyone dismissed the film or the book for that reason; the various other criticisms leveled against the series, however - that it is racist, as Phillip Pullman claimed recently, or sexist, and centered around the concept of a masculine, muscular and very Western Christianity - are certainly arguable. They are points that have more to do with the later Chronicles, but the groundwork is layed here, and one could take umbrage with the royal precedence given to Peter and Edmund over Lucy and Susan, or the hierarchy of the animals. I'd rather look at the story as a children's fable by an intelligent theologian; but subtexts can always be found, considered and contended.

The Chronicles Of Narnia has a direct cousin, both in literature and film, in Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings series (although Tolkien was hardly a fan of his friend's tales and their mishmashed mythology). Anyone who's read that trilogy knows that Peter Jackson made quite a number of changes when he brought it to the screen, including a similar extension of a few paragraphs in The Two Towers into one of the longest battles ever capture on film. He received relatively little criticism for these alterations, due, I think, to the coalescing of his passion for the material and the intensity of his personal vision. He made the films feel more faithful than they actually were; they were the embellished memories of someone who had read and loved the books. Adamson hits the predictable sort of middle ground. He doesn't want to step on the feet of the purists, nor does want to deprive audiences of spectacle, but he doesn't he have the directorial finesse to fully push the story into the realm of the cinematic epic while maintaining the intimacy of the novel - which is where Jackson succeeded so astoundingly; adapting material like this is a lose-lose situation that every now and then someone like him manages to win.

Adamson's love of this material seems slavish, but not quite passionate. He hits the emotional chords, gets the color scheme right, put all the characters in their places and sets the camera in a position to catch the action with some degree of style; but I wonder if, ultimately, he was too intent on letting the overriding vision be Lewis,' rather than his own. It's an admirable conceit, but it neglects the fact that Lewis' vision was already optimally represented in ink, on paper. Throughout The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, there's a conflict of scope and tone, of excess and restraint, that is never quite reconciled, and it leaves the built-in audience open to the one thing that will undo just about any literary adaptation: making comparisons to the source.