It is rather a puzzle the question of what audience the makers of The Golden Compass were trying to target. Readers of the books will arrive with too great expectation for a film as dark and complex as its source material, something the producers were unwilling to give, and those uninitiated in Philip Pullman’s fantastical world will likely be baffled at the rapid fire of concepts that took 400 pages in the a novel to explain properly. Adults expecting controversy that gave the movie buzz will find a “cleansed” version skirting certain thematic questions, and kids will tire of the endless exposition and balk at the dark elements that remain. In fact, with a PG-13 rating, it could hardly even be considered a children’s movie despite its marketing, although it does center on a child as a central character, Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards). Lyra lives at Jordan College in Oxford as an apparent orphan, delivered there by her uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), for her education. However, this is not the Oxford as we know it, for Lyra’s Oxford is in a parallel universe where people’s souls take the form of animals outside their bodies, called daemons, which shape-shift when belonging to children. The reason for this phenomenon is Dust, mysterious particles that are not understood and feared by many and drive them to kidnap children to experiment. Lyra is thrown into the bitter conflict after the arrival of a mysterious women, Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman), forces Lyra to leave her home, thrusting her into a journey in which she encounters witches, armored bears, gyptians, a rugged aeronaut, and a mysterious golden instrument, a truth-reader, called an alethiometer. This is obviously an atypical adventure, but even purged of original philosophic implications, few tales can rival the darkly and richly imagined stories lent by Pullman’s novels.
If prospective audiences receive conflicting messages on who the film panders to, then who’s left to enjoy it? Well for those simply searching for some passable holiday entertainment, The Golden Compass does show some rays of promise. It’s a positive feast of visuals—expansive arctic and sea landscapes, a fully realized and imaginative world including a stunning sequence in a fictitious city, and the kind of artful cinematography that so rarely graces blockbusters. It is also a delight to see the daemons onscreen; Pan’s smooth morphs from animal to animal are charming to watch every time. Also, take a look at the cast and it’s obvious that the overall acting could in no way be unsatisfactory. The real standouts are Sam Elliot as Lee Scoresby the aeronaut, underused but still commanding his scenes with his stout, western-accented tones; Ian McKellen lending an equally impressive, fierce voice to the armored bear Iorek Byrnison; and Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra herself. She might not be a prodigy, but for a film acting novice having to largely carry the weight of the entire story on her shoulders, Richards made an impressive debut as the feisty heroine. Nicole Kidman made for a sufficiently icy villain Mrs. Coulter, if occasionally outshone by her menacing golden monkey daemon, but the effect was spoiled with blasting melodramatic music in several scenes. The score was by no means poor as a whole, but the filmmakers needed to learn that simple silence is sometimes more effective then layering on overdramatic swells of music. The same lesson could be applied to the writing of the picture. Like another recent fantasy sequel based on a wildly popular series that shall remain unnamed, Compass zips along from scene to scene, montage to montage, feeling the need to shoehorn in nearly every morsel of its beloved source material, albeit reordered. It is not a sin to leave out minor, even major, scenes in an adaptation if done properly. It is a sin to include so many as to let no time for development and force a choppy, hasty pace. As an aside to fans of the book, be prepared to miss the actual ending to the story; it was lopped off when the studio opted for a “cheerier” ending. They achieved cheeriness; they also achieved cheesiness, a disappointing, anticlimactic conclusion to a film that could have been so much more.
