On the post-Potter crowded shelves of young adult fantasy literature, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series is a glorious bright spot, an emotional, no-punches-pulled, captivating coming-of-age story.
Fans of the books will likely find New Line's film version of The Golden Compass to be a disappointingly paper-thin rendition that barely scratches the surface -- then, for good measure, chops off the ending.
But those who haven't read the books will likely be even worse off, as I'm not sure they'll have any idea what's going on to begin with.
Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards) is an orphan who lives in a parallel-universe Oxford, where children are being kidnapped by a mysterious shadow organization. She wants to go exploring in the North with her absentee uncle Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), but instead ends up becoming an assistant to a rich socialite named Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman). Sadly, she finds out that Mrs. Coulter is the one kidnapping children, so she books it out of there and ends up heading north anyway to rescue the kids, with the help of a giant armor-wearing polar bear voiced by Ian McKellen.
The problem is, the film hits pretty much all of those plot points in the time it took you to read the above paragraph. The Golden Compass is a compelling read, but it is also a very deliberate one. Quite a long time is spent on the characters, the places, the mythology. But at a scant 113 minutes, the film barely has enough time to zip from plot point to plot point with no breathing room in between.
All of the discussion prior to the film's release about whether or not writer-director Chris Weitz was going to cut out the books' strong anti-religious message was a red herring. The anti-Church undertones were cut, yes, but so was nearly everything else.
Many of the problems with Golden Compass can be blamed squarely on the film's run time. It's nearly forty minutes shorter than the first Harry Potter film. Even understanding that the film's makers wanted to appeal to a slightly younger audience than the books doesn't excuse this. We know that kids' attention can be held for two and a half hours, which is, at a minimum, what Golden Compass should have run.
For fans, there are a few great moments. Pullman's books are filled with amazing characters, and to see some of them seemingly leap out of your imagination and onto a screen is nothing less than a delight. I speak primarily of Sam Elliott's turn as cowboy aeronaut Lee Scoresby -- not to mention Kathy Bates' pitch-perfect delivery of the two brief lines given to Scoresby's hare-daemon Hester.
I'm trying to avoid the use of the phrase "woefully underutilized," but to see Elliott and Bates steal the show with their five minutes of screen time is bittersweet. Also, I'm amazed that I'm saying this, but I think perhaps we got too much of the armored bear Iorek Byrnison. As fantastic a character as he is, the CG effects are a little low-budget, the dialogue and fight scenes a little toned down for the kids.
And speaking of low-budget CG, something else that could easily have been cut away are the scenes in which Lyra reads her alethiometer (the titular Compass, a glorified fortune-telling device). At least five different times during the movie, the camera zooms into the clockwork innards of the compass, and we watch golden dust swirl around and random pictures appear. I understand that the alternative is just to show Lyra staring at a compass like it was a graphing calculator, but these scenes were ridiculously bad, as if the director's 15-year old nephew got a copy of Adobe After Effects for his birthday and made them during study hall.
While Golden Compass spends a great deal of time discussing the back story and mythology of the world -- lots of talk about daemons, Dust, alethiometers, the vaguely religious body of the Magisterium, and a mysterious "war" on the horizon -- nothing is actually ever resolved. It doesn't happen that way in the book, either (that's left to the sequels) but at least the novel has hundreds of pages of character study and well-paced intrigue to fall back on. Since the film replaces all of that with a madcap hour-and-fifty-minute race to the finish line, very little makes sense if you don't already know the answers by having read the books.
And all this is to say *nothing *of what they did to the ending. (Spoilers ahead.)
Ever seen Seven? Imagine if Seven ended like this:
Kevin Spacey: (walks into police department) I'm the man you're looking for.
Brad Pitt: Great! Put this guy in jail! Hey, we totally caught him and he only killed five people! Good police work, everybody! Let's all take a half day!
THE END
The Golden Compass, the book, concludes with a tragic event. Without giving too much away, it is a powerful moment that underscores so much of what makes the novel work. Punches don't get pulled. People die who don't deserve it. Characters are neither wholly good nor wholly evil.
And importantly, in a narrative sense, the ending does tell us more about the backstory stuff that the book and film spend so much time on. It's where Lyra's uncle Asriel finally makes his return, after having set events in motion then disappeared.
So it is utterly ridiculous that the final act of the book is chopped cleanly away from the film. Instead of having a powerful, if not entirely happy, ending, the film now has a Hollywood-saccharine, but completely neutered, final moment. Not only do we miss out on the gut-punch of the climactic scene, Daniel Craig slips into the "woefully underutilized" category and nobody has any idea why he is even in the film to begin with.
Here's the crazy part: From all appearances, this was a very last-minute decision. The final scenes were apparently filmed. After seeing the movie, we were paging through the kids' storybook based on the movie, which was illustrated with film stills -- and had all of the cut scenes. Again, concerns that the film was being whitewashed for Christmas family audiences because of the removal of the atheist undertones isn't nearly the biggest problem. They changed a powerful ending to a totally flaccid one because they want people to leave the theater all smiles. These are great books that don't deserve such treatment.
Weitz says that the scenes will be moved to the opening of the film's sequel, The Subtle Knife. This will likely deprive The Subtle Knife's introduction of its brilliant WTF factor (there's no Lyra, and it doesn't even take place in the same universe), but it's just another straw on the camel's back, at this point.
Pullman, for his part, tells fans that "every film has to make changes to the story that the original book tells," and that he's alright with the cuts. I think he's being far too kind. Really, it's not that I hate movies based on books. I mention the* Harry Potter *films multiple times, not because I think they are great works of cinema (they aren't) or because I like Harry Potter more than The Golden Compass (I don't). It's because they made the transition reasonably intact. Golden Compass doesn't.
See Also:
- The Golden Compass: The Making Of Philip Pullman's Epic Fantasy
- Making A Movie About Killing God Is Not Easy As Pie
- Daemons, Alethiometers, And The Fall Of Man: Inside The Film Version
- Guest Opinion: America's Best-Known Atheist Riffs On Golden Compass
- Golden Compass Dev Discusses Challenges Of Making A Licensed Game
