Kate and I went to see The Golden Compass last night because, dude, armored bears! Also, we both really enjoyed the book, back when it first came out (though I haven’t re-read it since The Amber Spyglass, to see if it was retroactively ruined by the third volume).
From the opening titles in the left-over Lord ot ht Rings font, it’s clear that this is New Line’s bid to reassert their dominance over the “movie adaptations of popular fantasy books” genre, and as a spectacle, it’s very good. There’s a nifty steampunk aesthetic to Lyra’s world and, dude, armored bears!
I didn’t walk out of the theater saying “Oh, YES!!” the way I did with The Fellowship of the Ring, though, and I don’t expect that we’ll be seeing it again in a week, the way we did with that movie.
I remembered essentially nothing about the book other than the very bare outlines of the plot, which was sort of helpful in two respects: one, it makes it easier to guess how the movie would play for someone who hadn’t read the books at all, and two, it made it easier to keep track of what the hell was going on. The movie move very fast, and feels sort of compressed. It’s the rare example of a movie that would’ve been better if it were half an hour longer.
Much of the compression was achieved through the use of thuddingly obvious expository dialogue, which is something of a pet peeve. It does make it easier to follow the plot, but it could’ve been handled a little more smoothly given a bit more running time. It also makes it more difficult to identify with the characters– we don’t spend enough time with John Faa and Ma Kosta for their decisions to have any real emotional resonance. Similarly, Lee Scoresby and Iorek Byrnison don’t really get enough screen time to fully develop them– Scoresby, in particular, doesn’t end up as much more than a gun-toting version of Sam Elliott’s narrator in The Big Lebowski.
Much has been made of the decision to remove explicit references to religion from the movie– the church beoming the “Magisterium,” and so on. Thanks to the crashingly obvious dialogue, though, this doesn’t really obscure the message. Anybody who’s too dim to pick up that the Magisterium represents religion probably couldn’t figure out how to buy tickets to the movie in the first place.
On the whole, it was a pretty good movie. The CGI and other effects were done well, and the look of the film is terrific. It’s a reasonably faithful adaptation of the book, as I remember it, and the acting is generally good (subject to the usual caveats regarding child actors). There are many worse ways to spend a Saturday night.
And, dude, armored bears!