killmoms

The Golden Compass

I’d been nervous about the film adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s great sci-fi/fantasy epic The Golden Compass ever since I’d seen an “in development” trailer for it at work about a year ago. I tried to psych myself up going into the theater this past Sunday, but I still had niggling doubts. The book is a pretty sprawling work that covers a lot of territory between its two covers, and to turn it into a film seemed to me a pretty dangerous task. Still, I hoped.

That hope was unfounded. Simply put, The Golden Compass fails on pretty much every level as a film. It is a work that lacks all the drama, narrative thrust and significance of the original work. Instead of presenting a story and characters one is inclined to care about, actors flit across the screen leaving little to no impact. Each plot point leads to another but the movie fails to give any of them dramatic weight, and so we are left with two excruciatingly painful hours of cinema.

It seems clear to me at this point that New Line is searching about frantically for fantasy epics to fill the giant-sized shoes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and this film (like The Chronicles of Narnia before it) is just the latest story to fall prey to this misguided quest. No one at New Line seems to be able to discern that the reason for LotR’s success was Peter Jackson. That trilogy worked because Jackson had a single, uncompromising vision and an intense passion for the material. Everything that followed—the nearly perfect script, the exceptional cast and their performances, the fantastic art direction, Howard Shore’s brilliant score—were a result of Jackson’s relentless pursuit of perfection.

In contrast, The Golden Compass stands little to no chance of success. The script was originally written by British (that’s American!, Ed.) playwright Tom Stoppard, but was scrapped and re-written by director Chris Weitz, who manages to strip all the depth and significance out of the original work and replace it with dialogue and pacing that insults the viewer’s intelligence. Particularly painful is a segment in which Lord Asriel mentions out loud the threat of bandits in the area in which he’s traveling, and then almost immediately is attacked by bandits. It is fair to say that a LOT happens in the novel, but part of the process of adapting a novel is knowing how to condense it and get the important information across in a dramatic manner. Instead, the treatment here tries to cram as much as possible into two hours, and the viewer suffers for it. The whole tale feels rushed and over-explained.

When a great director and great cast combine their talents, sometimes a lackluster script can be saved from being a bad movie. Unfortunately, Weitz lacks the talent to shape the considerable raw acting prowess of his cast into characters that anyone would be particularly inclined to care about, and the cast is hampered by the aforementioned problematic script. Particularly maddening is the movie’s main character Lyra, played by first-time actress Dakota Blue Richards. While she isn’t cloyingly sweet or annoying as many child actors can be, neither is she particularly engaging. I never got the sense that she really felt strongly about anyone or anything else in the movie. She simply didn’t convey any of the fierce intelligence or rebellious nature so integral to the character. Nicole Kidman, an actress more than capable of great performances, fails to particularly intimidate in the way Miss Coulter should. Daniel Craig fails to convey any of the regal bearing or concealed affection for Lyra that Asriel should possess. And the computer-generated dæmons, especially Pantalaimon, are stripped of any of their redeeming characteristics by a script that treats them largely as cute sidekicks rather than manifestations of the characters’ souls.

After all this, even the best computer-generated effects out there can’t save this train wreck. The visuals in the film are striking, although don’t mesh entirely with my mind’s vision of Lyra’s Oxford (though what film CAN match one’s own imagination?). Worse yet, every painful minute of the film seems to be scored, and scored badly. A good film score serves to provide emotional cues and add dramatic weight to the narrative arc of the film. This score merely distracts and draws attention to itself by being terribly banal. And to cap it all off, the film ends with no sense of resolution whatsoever—you can almost hear New Line marketing drones hiding behind the massive CG bulk of Iorek saying “Stay tuned for The Golden Compass II: Electric Boogaloo!”

I’ve been working on this review for an hour and could go on, but I’m all bitched out. There is no reason you should go see The Golden Compass—it’s a wholesale failure as a movie. If you’re unfamiliar with the books but are intrigued by the story’s premise or the controversy it has stirred up, I’d strongly encourage you to read the books instead. Being targeted towards pre-teens/teens they’re certainly an easy, but rewarding, read.

In other news: I’m re-reading Drew Weing’s excellent The Journal Comic. It’s a great diary strip whose simplicity and frankness really resonates with me. I’m thinking about buying it in dead-tree format (along with some of Drew and Elanor’s other shorter works).

Filed by matt at December 15th, 2007 under Movies, Web