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December 9, 2007
The Golden Compass - Spoiler-Free Thoughts
Liam asked what we thought of The Golden Compass, so here goes.
I have read the books many times, and love them. The Spouse hasn't read the books. I'll try to accurately reflect our various reactions to the film because they really were quite different.
The movie, we both agree, looks wonderful. The settings and machinery in Lyra's world are great retro-futuristic pieces that really help to establish the setting as related-to, but different-from, our own world.
Nicole Kidman is incredible as Mrs. Coulter. 'Nuff said.
Also incredible, though in a smaller role, is Hattie Morahan (I didn't know who she was, either) as Sister Clara, the matron of Bolvangar. She's luminous and oh-so-very-very wrong. When she's on the screen, you can't look away.
Not so fabulous is Daniel Craig. But that's only because he's not much of a presence in the first book. (And I'm not going to say anything substantive about the other books.) The film does a surprisingly good job of following the book, and so Craig's Lord Asrael doesn't get much screen time.
The one thing that I am seriously torn about is the ending of the movie. I won't give anything away, but the movie ends before the first book does. This sets up a different dynamic for the cliff-hanger between the first and second books/movies. I'm not sure how I feel about that. And, if you've read the books, there's a whopper of an ironic statement that ... well, they're going to have to bring it back for the second movie, as it really is important to what happens next in the narrative. (And commenters, please don't reveal anything about the ending or the irony there. Not everyone has seen the movie or read the books yet.)
On the other hand, the movie is gaining tremendous attention/controversy because of its anti-religious agenda. I won't reveal anything of import by telling those who haven't yet read the books that "The Authority" is the books' name for God, and "The Magisterium" is The Church. We learn very, very early on in the movie that the agents of The Magisterium aren't rooting for the success of the same people we are in the story. I bring this up because The Spouse was unclear, after watching the film, what, exactly The Authority was. The euphemistic nature of the term does lead one to assume that defying The Authority simply means breaking the rules of The Magisterium/Church. (He was also not at all aware that The Magisterium is The Church -- it seems like a civil authority in the film.) This ambiguity is, I am certain, intentional on the part of the film.
(I do wonder, however, how much of the film is really lost on those who haven't read the book. It's certainly not as bad as it was when my father and I went to the theater to see David Lynch's Dune. Without a solid grounding in the epic storylines and vast array of characters from the book, the film can be impenetrable. The Golden Compass isn't impenetrable to viewers who haven't read the book... but following my conversations with The Spouse about it, I think that I had a much richer, more nuanced experience than he did. He simply didn't know enough to be able to decipher all of the narrative and visual shorthand employed in the film.)
Yahoo's Buzz Log recently ran a brief story about the controversy and how it is fueling debate (and web searches about atheism) all over the Internet. Yahoo has since closed the comments on that article: "due to numerous violations of our Comment Policy and Guidelines. Hopefully this will just be a cooling off period, and we look forward to restoring existing comments as well as accepting new submissions." Controversy and debate are, apparently, good for Yahoo... as long as they happen on your web site.
The real anti-religious material in the books, however, only intensifies as the series progresses. It will be interesting to see what the filmmakers do with this.
Finally, The Spouse and I discussed the relative merits of the film in a market saturated with heroic fantasy child-narratives (Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, etc.). I mentioned that one of the distinguishing features of Pullman's books is that they're exceptionally well-written. Their subject matter is more serious and much darker than Lewis' or Rowling's books, and Pullman is frankly a better prose stylist. When translated to the screen, however, C.S. Lewis' didacticism and pedantry is all-but-impossible to detect beneath the lush visuals and epic plot. Rowling's endless comma-splices and reliance on stock-characterizations are invisible on screen, and her narrative excesses are trimmed away in the more compact medium of the films. Pullman's rich play with language, ideas, and the interior lives of his characters, however, is largely lost on the screen. The films begin to seem... alike, much more so than their source material ever could.
Posted by reparent at December 9, 2007 11:50 AM
Comments
I liked it more than I thought I would. Luscious eye candy, and ditto to Richard's performance praise. My biggest gripe is with the film's visual representation of alethiometer use. (That's the compass. The idea is that any question, and any answer, can be represented symbolically.) But the film skips over Lyra's symbolic reasoning and intuition (after the very first time, anyway) in favor of extremely literal illustration. We don't get to share her metaphor-parsing. We just have visions of answers (people's faces, mostly). The film has a decent child actor, and she's got a daemon, and this is an absolutely perfect narrative device for sneaking exposition into dialogue ("What are you doing, Lyra?" asks the little woodland animal on her shoulder). I'd much rather listen to the two of them talk about the compass than witness another dusty vision.
Posted by: Liam at December 29, 2007 2:49 PM
That's some stern criticism. I would venture to say the movie must qualify as an abject failure if audiences are so disappointed in how the title character is depicted that they'd rather revert to the original story-telling devices of the book.
Your criticism apparently supports the earlier assertion that the book was extremely well written. It's fascinating when cinema becomes the great literary equalizer, rendering pathetic prose palatable while negating nuanced narrative.
Posted by: coeurlion at December 30, 2007 3:12 PM
Didn't mean to be too terribly stern! It wasn't an abject failure. I just wish the filmmakers would remember that film isn't an exclusively visual medium. Flashy images aren't always an adequate substitute for dialogue. I like words. Words are good and useful, and words like "rendering pathetic prose palatable while negating nuanced narrative" are fun to read out loud.
Posted by: Liam at January 3, 2008 11:03 AM