HEREWITH A (BELATED) REVIEW OF THE THE GOLDEN COMPASS CINEMATIC PICTURE EXPERIENCE

So as any regular reader (ha) of this blog knows, I'm a big ol' nerd for Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials kiddie fantasy series, of which The Golden Compass is the first book. Said hypothetical readers will also likely know that I've been anticipating/dreading Chris Weitz's adaptation of same for a few years now. So keep in mind that the following opinions are coming from someone with absolutely NO PERSPECTIVE on the subject; they are coming from someone with a vested interest in seeing two polar bears fight in a "two men enter, one man leave" cage match. Also keep in mind that there are going to be SPOILERS ahead, especially if you haven't read the book but also maybe if you have. Here's the short, spoiler-free review: parts of it are good or even awesome, parts of it aren't are maddeningly terrible. Go see it if a polar bear cage match sounds appealing. Also, just go see it, because I want to see New Line just attempt to make the third book into a movie, and that won't happen if nobody goes to see this one. End of spoiler-free review.

Here are the parts that are good and/or awesome: Sam Elliott could not be more perfect as Lee Scoresby (and Kathy Bates is the voice of his daemon Hester, which is possibly even better). Nicole Kidman is suprisingly good as Mrs. Coulter--she's got the right mix of slippery charm and ruthless devotion that the part requires. Daniel Craig has about five minutes of screen time, but he acquits himself well and certainly gives the impression that he can easily handle Asriel's expanded roles in the second and third movies. Though Dakota Blue Richards is not the Lyra I envisioned, thankfully she doesn't embarrass herself, and steps up her game when the scene demands it. She's better here than Daniel Radcliffe was in the first Harry Potter movie, so my hope is that she'll continue to grow into her role as he has.

Iorek Byrnison turned out better than I had hoped. The CGI is frequently astonishingly lifelike, and even when it's not it's not distractingly fake, and Ian McKellan is a fine (if unimaginative) choice to give the exiled bear king voice. His ferocity, his nobility, and his tender paternal relationship with Lyra are all well-realized and believable. It's also a hoot to hear Ian McShane chewing the scenery as Ragnar (the movie's renamed version of Iofur Raknison, the usurping bear king), and the fight between the two bears is spectacular, and ends in one of the most shocking moments I've seen in a movie this year.

So the cast are mostly varying degrees of excellent, but I know that wasn't your main concern. You want to know about the churchy stuff. For those of you who haven't read the book, haven't read any articles about the book or the movie, or didn't get your official boycott invite from the Catholic League, the Big Bad in this story is basically the Catholic Church. In the book this is made pretty explicit; in the movie, as you can imagine, it is not. This Atlantic Monthly article gives a pretty good overview of the book's journey to the screen, the contoversy over its antireligious elements, and the controversy over the removal of its antireligious elements. (And when I say "elements," I mean "basically the whole point of the series.") What's interesting, though, is that in turning the Church into the all-emcompassingly evil Magisterium, Weitz and his collaborators have actually made the Church look even worse than Pullman did. Seriously: anybody who's paying attention at all cannot fail to see that the Magisterium is a stand-in for a religious organization. The costumes may have a military flavor, but they're still pretty damn clerical, as are the actors who play the Magisterium's officers: Christopher Lee and frickin' Derek Jacobi. They talk about "heresy" ALL THE TIME. Mrs. Coulter goes on and on about how the Magisterium just wants to tell people how to think, but in a nice way. The Magisterium is like the Catholic League's worst nightmare about what Secular Hollywood Liberals think the Catholic Church is like. Everybody connected with the Magisterium practically radiates EEEEEVIL. It's been a while since I read the book, but I seem to remember Pullman at least making his villains seem sort of human. The antireligious stuff has been toned down, but it's also, weirdly, been turned up to 11. (It's also hard to miss the God stuff when literally every single review or article I've read about the movie has made a point of mentioning it, which I more-or-less predicted here.)

And that's this movie's biggest failing: it engages only superficially with the source material. It's been a week two weeks since I saw the movie (and since I wrote everything above), and my feelings for it have only dimmed in that time. It's not just the theology that gets ignored--it's the story itself. Even more than the first couple of Harry Potter movies, The Golden Compass is just a Cliff's Notes for the book. Scenes barely have time to make their point before we're on to the next one. Everyone speaks in exposition. Important story points, like Lyra learning to use the alethiometer, are glossed over in favor of fakey CGI and chosen-one hoohah. (Also, nobody can say "alethiometer" without saying it like this: "The alethiometer--the golden compass--is the most important etc. etc." Yes thank you movie people we are not all idiots who need our hands held.) The relationship between humans and their daemons is never adequately explained, and so scenes like Lyra finding the "ghost child" or the intercision do not have the horrific effect they should have. We're barely introduced to Iorek before he's fighting Ragnar for his kingdom. Even just setting up the most basic plot elements--Gobblers are stealing children--seems beyond the capabilities of the filmmakers. And so on and so on and so on.

But the single most galling thing about this movie, which just seems worse and worse the more I think about it, is the ending. Anybody who's read the book could not help but remember the ending: Lyra finally reunited with Lord Asriel, the man she now knows to be her father, and triumphantly delivering the alethiometer to him, only to realize that what he needed was a child--her best friend Roger--to provide the energy for the engine that would enable him to travel between worlds, find the source of Dust and defeat God. It is a thrilling, heartbreaking ending, the kind of thing that turns an above-average fantasy adventure into a classic, and makes you salivate for the next volume.

So, of course, the movie cuts out about twenty minutes before that, with some generic "we saved the day but we've still got some more day-saving to do, hopefully in some future movies" bullshit. Now, I know why this was done: A) to give the movie an ostensibly "happier" ending, and B) to avoid the scene where Pullman-via-Asriel lays out the story's blasphemous theological underpinnings. Too bad the "happy" ending fails to make you excited for the next part of the story in any way. "We wanted to end the first one as up-note as possible," says writer-director Chris Weitz in this Entertainment Weekly article, which is chock-full of similarly infuriating quotes from the filmmakers. In that same article, producer Deborah Forte says "[they] don't know" if that scene, which was filmed, will be included in the (increasingly unlikely) Subtle Knife film, which just lays bare how everyone involved with this movie is either completely misunderstanding or willfully ignoring the text--not just the subtext, the actual text, right there in black and white for everyone to see--of Pullman's books. Not including that scene is like adapting The Lord of the Rings and cutting out the Ring. Like maybe Gandalf just says "Hey, Frodo, maybe you should go to Mordor for some reason okay."

The irony is that all these changes were obviously made in order to make The Golden Compass more "palatable" for a wide audience, but the changes have turned a wonderful, timeless story into a barely coherent, frequently boring adventure flick, soon to be consigned to the bargain DVD shelf at Best Buy after disappointing reviews and a weak theatrical run. There is no reason an adaptation of The Golden Compass--one of the few fantasy novels that doesn't owe a massive debt to Tolkien--should be inspiring critical comments like this: "In fact, so much of The Golden Compass is fantasy-by-numbers that all that really interests you is what makes this world so special that some studio had to spend millions to bring it to life. The uniqueness is there if you look for it, but it labors under so much rote storytelling and sweeping CGI vistas that it takes an inordinate amount of time to get anywhere remotely interesting." Perhaps if Weitz, et al. had made a movie that stayed true to Pullman's vision--the vision that has already captured millions of readers--they might have earned that wide audience after all.

Also: I can't help but think that this awesome news is the result of someone at New Line slapping his/her forehead and saying "Hey, we fucked up The Golden Compass, maybe we shouldn't do that with The Hobbit, maybe." Hopefully Peter Jackson will soon announce he's directing too.