Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Sept 25, 2016 9:29:12 GMT -5
The Golden Compass
Dir. Chris Weitz
Premiered December 7, 2007
As mentioned in my review of Stardust, The Lord of the Rings created a very top-heavy media environment based on adaptations and remakes of recognizable properties– an environment that is today showing its cracks as Hollywood struggles to find more such properties, and equally struggles to balance he needs of the adaptation process with the expectations of an increasingly demanding fan base. I also mentioned that The Lord of the Rings briefly gave the impression that fantasy as a genre was suddenly profitable for film, which it wasn’t.
The Golden Compass is emblematic of both of those issues, having been greenlit all the way back in February 2002, just two months after the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, by the same studio that had made that film, New Line Cinema. It then went through a long, troubled development, with screenwriter and director Chris Weitz repeatedly being sent to the drawing board over concerns that his adapted screenplay wasn’t marketable in the United States.
The reason for that is probably the best-known thing about this movie. The Golden Compass was adapted from part of a series of books called His Dark Materials written in the 1990s by British author Philip Pullman, in which the book’s main villain, the Magisterium, is allegedly a stand-in for religion in general– I’ve not read the books, so I can’t be certain. For this reason, Weitz was ordered to tone down the atheistic message for fear of generating controversy, which of course happened anyway. Almost every Christian group in America, Protestant or Catholic, spoke out against the film, and the country being significantly more religious in 2007 than today, this bad buzz supposedly turned The Golden Compass into a failure.
I seriously doubt this theory, as not only was His Dark Materials pretty obscure in the US to begin with; the film just plainly sucks. Watching the film, I immediately understood what was wrong with it, and it just kept going.
The Golden Compass is set in a parallel world to our own, roughly analogous to a futurized version of the 1930s, in which a mysterious cosmic element known only as “dust” causes human souls to manifest in the form of intelligent spirit animals known as daemons. Because the dust has yet to settle on children, their daemons have the power to change form before deciding on a final adult incarnation, but there are machinations afoot to prevent the dust from taking hold altogether.
I will try to explain this inasmuch as the film explains anything at all: the Magisterium, our stand-in for the Catholic Church, wants to suppress the study or application of dust by restricting research by universities and using their technology to sever the psychic link between children and their daemons. In service of this, children all over are being abducted by bandits known as Gobblers and sent to a research facility/prison in the Arctic.
The leading researcher into dust is Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), who is sent away from Jordan College due to his views and vows to study dust on his own, possibly uncovering the secret of parallel worlds. Soon after, Asriel’s orphan niece Lyra Belaqua (Dakota Blue Richards) and her daemon Pantalaimon (Freddie Highmore) are sent into the care of the mysterious and glamourous Marisa Coulter (Nicole Kidman). Before leaving the college, however, one of Asriel’s sympathetic compatriots gives Lyra the last surviving Alethiometer, or Golden Compass, which acts as something of a cosmic Magic 8-Ball through the power of dust. Although the knowledge required to use Alethiometers is lost, Lyra takes to it immediately, the film implying that she is the subject of a “witches’ prophecy.” Yep, another YA chosen-one.
After being paraded around what appears to be this world’s version of London, Lyra escapes from Coulter, who is leading the Gobblers, and is rescued by a band of Gyptians (think Gypsies crossed with Vikings) who themselves have lost a child and are on a mission to the Arctic to find him. On the way, Lyra meets aeronaut Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott), whose services are needed to reach their destination, as well as Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Ian McKellen), the exiled former king of a race of talking warrior polar bears who seeks to recapture his throne from Ragnar Sturlusson (Ian McShane), who is himself seeking a human-style daemon. She also runs in with Serafina Pekkala (Eva Green), one of a race of witches who briefly implies she is Lyra’s mother, but this is confusing in itself for reasons I won’t spoil.
If you’re noticing a lot of high-profile actors in here, it’s not for nothing. Jim Carter, Kathy Bates, Kristin Scott Thomas, Christopher Lee, and Derek Jacobi all show up here in minor-to-medium roles, and this gets at the first problem with the film: everything is super-rushed. I didn’t read the first book, but I’m guessing it was way longer; every new character is introduced suddenly, yet with a sense of majesty and revelation that suggests a lot of buildup that never happened. Weitz allegedly did as much as he could to stay loyal to the book, but that’s more of a liability than an asset with a runtime under two hours.
The second problem is that I’m fairly certain the book is a lot darker and more violent than would strictly be allowed for a movie aimed at kids– i.e. it has blood. The film is thus an acheivement in bloodless carnage, straining credibility to its limits by omitting any sign of the precious red fluid even in scenes that demand it, such as one character’s jaw being torn off.
The third and perhaps largest problem is that it’s incomplete, with a ton of characters and plot threads being introduced without even the hint of resolution. After doing some research, I discovered that not only is The Golden Compass the first of a series, it omits the somewhat fatalistic final three chapters of the book it’s based on (Northern Lights) in the hope of giving audiences a happier ending, and presumably leaving the rest for the sequels. The resulting film gives one the impression that New Line Cinema had total confidence that the film would launch a franchise, yet were terrified that the book’s atheistic themes would kill its success.
Instead, the film struggled in America, barely made a profit overseas, and put New Line, the studio that got us here with The Lord of the Rings, out of business.
Sign This Was Made in 2007
Meta Edition! Catholic and Protestant groups were united in opposition to this film. Today, the former Moral Majority would probably delight in the movie’s anti-clericalism.
Additional Notes
Atonement and The Golden Compass debuted on Friday, December 7, 2007– Juno came out two days earlier. The same weekend saw the release of David Wall’s truly-indie Christmas dramedy Noëlle.
Next Time: I Am Legend
Dir. Chris Weitz
Premiered December 7, 2007
As mentioned in my review of Stardust, The Lord of the Rings created a very top-heavy media environment based on adaptations and remakes of recognizable properties– an environment that is today showing its cracks as Hollywood struggles to find more such properties, and equally struggles to balance he needs of the adaptation process with the expectations of an increasingly demanding fan base. I also mentioned that The Lord of the Rings briefly gave the impression that fantasy as a genre was suddenly profitable for film, which it wasn’t.
The Golden Compass is emblematic of both of those issues, having been greenlit all the way back in February 2002, just two months after the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, by the same studio that had made that film, New Line Cinema. It then went through a long, troubled development, with screenwriter and director Chris Weitz repeatedly being sent to the drawing board over concerns that his adapted screenplay wasn’t marketable in the United States.
The reason for that is probably the best-known thing about this movie. The Golden Compass was adapted from part of a series of books called His Dark Materials written in the 1990s by British author Philip Pullman, in which the book’s main villain, the Magisterium, is allegedly a stand-in for religion in general– I’ve not read the books, so I can’t be certain. For this reason, Weitz was ordered to tone down the atheistic message for fear of generating controversy, which of course happened anyway. Almost every Christian group in America, Protestant or Catholic, spoke out against the film, and the country being significantly more religious in 2007 than today, this bad buzz supposedly turned The Golden Compass into a failure.
I seriously doubt this theory, as not only was His Dark Materials pretty obscure in the US to begin with; the film just plainly sucks. Watching the film, I immediately understood what was wrong with it, and it just kept going.
The Golden Compass is set in a parallel world to our own, roughly analogous to a futurized version of the 1930s, in which a mysterious cosmic element known only as “dust” causes human souls to manifest in the form of intelligent spirit animals known as daemons. Because the dust has yet to settle on children, their daemons have the power to change form before deciding on a final adult incarnation, but there are machinations afoot to prevent the dust from taking hold altogether.
I will try to explain this inasmuch as the film explains anything at all: the Magisterium, our stand-in for the Catholic Church, wants to suppress the study or application of dust by restricting research by universities and using their technology to sever the psychic link between children and their daemons. In service of this, children all over are being abducted by bandits known as Gobblers and sent to a research facility/prison in the Arctic.
The leading researcher into dust is Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), who is sent away from Jordan College due to his views and vows to study dust on his own, possibly uncovering the secret of parallel worlds. Soon after, Asriel’s orphan niece Lyra Belaqua (Dakota Blue Richards) and her daemon Pantalaimon (Freddie Highmore) are sent into the care of the mysterious and glamourous Marisa Coulter (Nicole Kidman). Before leaving the college, however, one of Asriel’s sympathetic compatriots gives Lyra the last surviving Alethiometer, or Golden Compass, which acts as something of a cosmic Magic 8-Ball through the power of dust. Although the knowledge required to use Alethiometers is lost, Lyra takes to it immediately, the film implying that she is the subject of a “witches’ prophecy.” Yep, another YA chosen-one.
After being paraded around what appears to be this world’s version of London, Lyra escapes from Coulter, who is leading the Gobblers, and is rescued by a band of Gyptians (think Gypsies crossed with Vikings) who themselves have lost a child and are on a mission to the Arctic to find him. On the way, Lyra meets aeronaut Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott), whose services are needed to reach their destination, as well as Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Ian McKellen), the exiled former king of a race of talking warrior polar bears who seeks to recapture his throne from Ragnar Sturlusson (Ian McShane), who is himself seeking a human-style daemon. She also runs in with Serafina Pekkala (Eva Green), one of a race of witches who briefly implies she is Lyra’s mother, but this is confusing in itself for reasons I won’t spoil.
If you’re noticing a lot of high-profile actors in here, it’s not for nothing. Jim Carter, Kathy Bates, Kristin Scott Thomas, Christopher Lee, and Derek Jacobi all show up here in minor-to-medium roles, and this gets at the first problem with the film: everything is super-rushed. I didn’t read the first book, but I’m guessing it was way longer; every new character is introduced suddenly, yet with a sense of majesty and revelation that suggests a lot of buildup that never happened. Weitz allegedly did as much as he could to stay loyal to the book, but that’s more of a liability than an asset with a runtime under two hours.
The second problem is that I’m fairly certain the book is a lot darker and more violent than would strictly be allowed for a movie aimed at kids– i.e. it has blood. The film is thus an acheivement in bloodless carnage, straining credibility to its limits by omitting any sign of the precious red fluid even in scenes that demand it, such as one character’s jaw being torn off.
The third and perhaps largest problem is that it’s incomplete, with a ton of characters and plot threads being introduced without even the hint of resolution. After doing some research, I discovered that not only is The Golden Compass the first of a series, it omits the somewhat fatalistic final three chapters of the book it’s based on (Northern Lights) in the hope of giving audiences a happier ending, and presumably leaving the rest for the sequels. The resulting film gives one the impression that New Line Cinema had total confidence that the film would launch a franchise, yet were terrified that the book’s atheistic themes would kill its success.
Instead, the film struggled in America, barely made a profit overseas, and put New Line, the studio that got us here with The Lord of the Rings, out of business.
Sign This Was Made in 2007
Meta Edition! Catholic and Protestant groups were united in opposition to this film. Today, the former Moral Majority would probably delight in the movie’s anti-clericalism.
Additional Notes
Atonement and The Golden Compass debuted on Friday, December 7, 2007– Juno came out two days earlier. The same weekend saw the release of David Wall’s truly-indie Christmas dramedy Noëlle.
Next Time: I Am Legend
