I’m going to pause for a moment here at the beginning of the review to let you rearrange your seating. If you felt that subtextual religious messages had no place in children’s entertainment back when The Chronicles of Narnia came out, you may want to move to the other side of the room. And the same for those who felt that such things were entirely appropriate and besides, if they were a bother you could just pay attention to the surface events and still enjoy the movie.
So, has everybody that needs to switched sides? Good, let’s get on with it.
I’ve never read Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials Trilogy, the first of which is the basis for The Golden Compass. I’m reliably informed, though, that neither Pullman nor the books have much good to say about organized religion. So the first question is how much of that is carried into the movie?
Unless the uproar over the books is very much an overreaction, it would seem the anti-religion theme has been very much muted by director/screenwriter Chris Weitz. Religion is never specifically mentioned beyond once using the word heresy, though it is easily inferable.
As with most all epic fantasy, the conflict in The Golden Compass reduces down to a simple battle between good and evil with (ultimately, I am told, not so much in this first movie) the fate of the universe up for grabs. Here we have Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards) as our young hero, unexpectedly thrust into things on the side of free thinkers seeking the truth about a mysterious “dust” that connects all people and parallel universes. In opposition is the Magisterium, which has criminalized even mentioning the existence of dust, attempts to kill people doing research into it, and is performing brutal experiments on children for some unknown reason to help keep the information suppressed. As Nicole Kidman’s Miss Coulter explains, the Magisterium tells people what to do, not in a mean way but because they can’t figure it out on their own.
In the book, the parallels between the Magisterium and the authoritarian control of medieval Europe by the Catholic Church may be strong, but here they are reduced to a whisper, and without much effort pretty much any dogmatic, authoritarian regime can be interpreted into the story. I suspect that if the Magisterium thugs were wearing Taliban-inspired turbans and beards instead of vaguely Pope-like robe outfits that many of the people now speaking out against the movie (without seeing it generally) would be silent.
This type of conflict between free-thinking freedom fighters and authoritarian control is common in fantasy and science fantasy stories (for example, see also The Matrix where computers try to control the very experience of reality for humankind or Serenity, where government’s attempt to eradicate all conflict between people has traumatic consequences). So the movie is a religion-sanitized version of the movie. If, as with the Catholic League, you would view the movie as a “gateway drug”1 to reading the books and it is important to you that children not be exposed to them, then that is all you need to know.
If, on the other hand, you either don’t care about the religious kerfuffle or want to take the movie as an independent entity from the book, then I suppose I should get around to actually reviewing the movie.
Long story short, it is a mixed bag. Let’s break the rules and do this in bulleted list form.
First, the bad:
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While it is entirely appropriate to the part, Nicole Kidman’s ice queen persona is quickly growing repetitious. She looks great as an art deco femme fatale assigned to get the titular golden compass away from Lyra. Her heart of coal may have had more impact if I didn’t feel like I’d see it too many times before.
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Several of the key actions scenes occur during low-light periods of the day and as a result these scenes can be somewhat indistinct. Other than the armored-bear battle it was so consistent that one wonders whether it was done to make it easier to blend the extensive CGI for these scenes.
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The movie crams a lot into its two hours. Translating popular epic fantasy onto film is a difficult endeavor we have grown used to in the last decade. Either you put everything the fans love into the movie and end up with 3-hour films (such as the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies) or you cut things out. The Golden Compass comes in under two hours so I assume things were cut, but there is still a lot crammed into those two hours and the transitions are pretty abrupt and minimally explained.
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Daniel Craig is only in the movie for about 5 minutes. At the risk of straying into man-crush territory, he has beautiful eyes and some more of his rugged handsomeness wouldn’t have hurt anybody.
And now the good:
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An active protagonist. My biggest beef with stories like these, where an unlikely protagonist ends up in the middle of a cosmic battle (again, see Harry Potter) is that the central character is too often just a passive lump in the middle of events. They have no idea what is going on, why it is happening, what needs to be done, and they just get into trouble so until the surrounding characters fix the problem for them. But Lyra is different, she doesn’t know a lot of the issues involved but she is still an active participant in events. She helps determine courses of action and comes up with her own solutions to problems. Her precociousness may be unrealistic but then this is within the fantasy genre, so maybe that should be allowed.
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Daemons! In The Golden Compass the word is used more in its original Greek sense than its eventual biblical one. Lyra’s world is in a parallel universe to ours and one that is very similar. But whereas in our world the soul is internal to the body, in hers the soul is an external companion and takes the form of an animal companion. It is a bonded relationship, with the death of one meaning the death of the other. The CGI on the daemons isn’t always great but they are blended into the action well and Lyra’s daemon Pantalaimon (Freddie Highmore; Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) allows easy externalization of Lyra’s internal emotions. Plus it is simply fun to watch “Pan” seamlessly change from ferret to finch to lynx as the needs and emotions change. In a bit of stereotyping that might raise as much controversy as the religion question, the daemons on the good side are predominantly feline while those on the side of evil are generally canine (or insects for the bureaucratic peons).
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Dakota Blue Richards. The Golden Compass is not only her feature film debut it would seem it is here screen acting debut, and she does a wonderful job of things. She doesn’t go immediately on to the list of the all time great child performances but think about it for a minute. The entire weight of a $180 million movie was put on her shoulders. Just being able to stand up under that burden is impressive but excels.
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Battling armored polar bears! Up in the far north of Lyra’s world there is a kingdom of talking, tool-using polar bears. Other than wearing armor when they fight, they otherwise look exactly like normal (though supersized a bit) polar bears. Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Ian McKellan) is an outcast prince who signs on to Lyra’s quest after she helps him recover his armor from the Magisterium. When the CGI bears were on screen, the movie was simply better for it.
You’ll notice in all of this I didn’t mention what Lyra’s quest really is. That’s because it is both too complex to summarize quickly (highlights: missing kids, dust research, artic evil lab, saving a family member) and also not all that important to this particular movie. I’m sure it provides a vital underpinning to the increasingly cosmically significant events of the next two books but for this movie alone it just acts a barely-there chain tying a string of action set pieces together.
The movie has no sex, drugs, or foul language but it is definitely not appropriate for young children as the movie earns its PG-13 rating in the battle scenes. Large sword-and-magic fights happen and people are explicitly killed during these fights. Except for one shock moment during the bear fight, things remain relatively bloodless during these fights and there is no gore, but they remain intense and the sparkly disintegration of daemon’s makes every death very obvious.
But for younger teenagers, this movie is exactly what I was imagining when I was young, reading all the epic fantasy I could get my hands on and imagining movie versions of them. As a standalone movie, it is my view that The Golden Compass succeeds in ways that the Harry Potter movies and the last two Lord of the Rings movies failed. It is also narratively much more complex than the very good The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Just as it is difficult to look back on the films of the 1950s and 1960s without thinking about Westerns or sword-and-sandal gladiator epics, one day it will be impossible to look back on this decade and not view it as the golden age of epic fantasy. With two more movies to be made (if they are made), one can’t really guess at the eventual importance of The Golden Compass within the genre. But it makes an good first impression.
- The Golden Compass is a New Line Cinema release
- Wide release December 7, 2007
- Written and Directed by Chris Weitz
- Starring Dakota Blue Richards, Freddie Highmore, Nicole Kidman, Ian McKellen, Sam Elliot, Daniel Craig
- Running time: 114 minutes
- Rated PG-13 for sequences of fantasy violence
- Alex’s rating: 7 out of 10
Footnote:
1 – The relevant quote from a Catholic League press release:
…Because “The Golden Compass” is based on the least offensive of the three books, and because it is being further watered down for the big screen, some might wonder why a boycott is warranted.
The Catholic League wants Christians to boycott this movie precisely because it knows that the film is bait for the books: unsuspecting parents who take their children to see the movie may be impelled to buy the three books as a Christmas present. And no parent who wants to bring their children up in the faith will want any part of these books.
