The Golden Compass

Year: 2007
Running time: 113 minutes
Certificate: PG
Language: English
Screenplay: Chris Weitz
Director: Chris Weitz
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Dakota Blue Richards, Eva Green, Sam Elliott, Ian McKellen (voice), Ben Walker, Freddie Highmore (voice)


Lrya searches for truth.

High on the success of The Lord of the Rings, and bolstered by the fact that Harry Potter was fast becoming the biggest grossing movie series in history, New Line thought they were onto another fantasy adaptation winner by developing Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The most obvious sign that they slipped up big time is the fact that New Line has stopped any and all work on the sequels, both of which were green-lit before the first part had been released. This is not, as many on the Christian right would have it, because the film is a "war on Christmas" (Bill O'Reilly, as over the top and ridiculous as ever), it is because it made $85 million from a budget of about $180 million. O'Reilly seems to have neglected to notice the film has been all but stripped of any anti-religious message. After watching it for half an hour or so, you’ll be able to see why it fared so badly; it is dreadful. Dreadful. Where Potter and Rings have forged their own movie legacy, while being respectful of and retaining the essence of their source material, this simply tries to make a buck off the back of a trend.

Set in an alternative retro-futurist (if that's possible) British city where people have their souls on the outside in the form of deamons (although that is simplifying the concept horribly; deamons are more a reflection of the soul and in children represent the potential for sin), and everyone lives under the influence of the Magisterium, a religious organisation that was conceived by Pullman as an oppressive alternative Catholic Church, but here it is re-imagined more as a 1984-style Government. Children begin to disappear and when her best friend Roger (Ben Walker) goes missing Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards) decides to try to find him and save him. On her journey she meets gypsies, a talking and brawling polar bear king-in-exile (an impressive CG creation voiced by Ian McKellen), witches (led by Eva Green's Serafina Pekkala) and a balloon-riding adventurer named Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott).

Mrs. Coulter: beautiful, sophisticated, evil.

To help her in her quest she has an Alethiometer, the Golden Compass of the title (although I much prefer the UK title Northern Lights), capable of revealing the truth, a precious commodity where a number of the people Lyra meets have secret agendas. The villain of the piece is Magisterium-backed Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman, who has never looked so incredible and is delightfully evil and the best thing in the film by miles), who is behind the kidnappings and heads up horrific experiments involving forcibly separating children from their deamons.

Daniel Craig plays Lord Asriel, a man on a mission to wage multi-dimensional war on the Magisterium and, in the novels, bring down god himself (beautifully imagined by Pullman as a senile useless shell, propped up entirely by the might of the powerful Magisterium). The lengths to which Lord Asriel is prepared to go to fight ensures, however, that he is no friend of Lyra's.

So what went wrong? It looks gorgeous, both in terms of scenery and characters, and the bear fight is highly impressive (although oddly bloodless, particularly when one of the fighters gets his entire lower jaw ripped off - the price you pay for a PG rating, I guess), but this is not nearly enough to succeed. It feels, for want of a better word, soulless, with the lush visuals failing to cover up a script that has no understanding of the themes of the novel, and turns events and layers and complexities into simple meetings and dull conversations, which in turn, are nothing more than excuses to get to the next meeting and conversation, pointing Lyra in the right direction. No character has a point beyond a brief conversation with Lyra. You can understand why much of the anti-religious undercurrent was removed, but it leaves some elements of the story not making sense - if the deamons don't represent the potential for sin, why is the church (Magisterium) separating them from their children, leaving the kids well-behaved lifeless husks (or dead or dying)? You can't make a story about destroying an outdated corrupt religion marketable to a country in which most people are believers in that very same religion. Everything is lost in translation.


One of countless alternate versions of one city.

It’s not like they didn’t have talent. Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Ian McKellen, Sam Elliot and Eva Green are all outstanding actors. In the lead role, newcomer Dakota Blue Richards does well; her Lyra strikes you as smart, confident and capable, but still naïve and innocent, just like Pullman's heroine should be. And it isn’t like they didn’t have the material to work with. The trilogy of books is intelligent, frightening, beautiful, heartbreaking and utterly, utterly fantastic. What it needed was a director and script that understood that and didn’t just want to make eye candy to generate revenue.

A crushing disappointment.

Score: 2/10

Owen at Entertainment Weekly thought much the same but critic royalty Roger Ebert is, on this occasion, wronger than a wrong thing.