The Golden Compass

The 2007 animated fantasy film, The Golden Compass tries to be a high-budget mainstream fantasy franchise on the same levels as something like The Chronicles of Narnia, The NeverEnding Story or The Lord of the Rings (the success of Fellowship of the Ring did inspire this film’s creation), but is instead an overly complicated, ridiculously boring, bland and ugly looking, insanely dialogue heavy, tonally confused film, resulting in a jumbled mess of a product that certainly doesn’t satisfy fans of the original source material its based on or casual moviegoers hoping for something different. In an alternate retro-futuristic Earth, the story follows Lyra (played by Dakota Blue Richards), a young orphan girl who recently lost her friend to a mysterious organisation who are doing terrible experiments while searching for a special mind-bonding substance simply called ‘’Dust’’. Helped by a special Golden Compass, she and her talking animal companion otherwise known as a dæmon named Pantalaimon (voiced by Freddy Highmore) journey across the world with a group of gypsies, a banished royal talking armored polar bear named Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Ian McKellen), to escape from the watchful eyes of the influential yet devious Mrs Coulter (played by Nicole Kidman), find her uncle Lord Asriel (played by Daniel Craig) who is searching for Dust and has posed a theory that could upend the entire social standing of their world and their rulers known as the Magisterium, and save her friend who is being surgically removed from his dæmon, which essentially acts as a piece of his own soul. Based on the first book, ‘’The Northern Lights’’ within a trilogy of stories by Phillip Pullman known as His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass mixed to unfavorable reception upon release, and was considered a box office disappointment which prevented any future movies within what was obviously supposed to become a franchise. The movies suffers from expected flaws that would usually come from a book to film adaptation problems, but is also plagued with general film problems like rushed characters, too much exposition, boring environments, awful effects, and a concept that could be much more interesting both visually and dialogue wise, but is reduced to such a stereotypical level that most likely doesn’t capture the true spirit of the original story.

The plot for this film seems to follow the content of the first story pretty closely and with extreme dedication, to a point where it becomes too clear how this was clearly written by a novelist and not given much assistance from the other screenwriter when making the film. Phillip Pullman did help write the movie along with director Chris Weitz and it really shows in how much exposition is in this film without much relief. The film is that awful mix of being painfully boring and uneventful, but also way too complicated and nonsensical. The story has aspects of fantastical imagination and creative world-building that helps it stand apart from other similar young adult magical stories, but its also a heavy dive into the scientific, resulting in confusing and drawn out dialogue scenes that are almost impossible to follow either because of the made-up mystical elements that aren’t given time to be established, or the scientific jargon that no child would likely understand. The fantasy elements from the book sound fun, visually creative and uniquely whimsical in a manner that seems to carry a hint of dark undertones with it that could result in an engaging series that would be able to mix child and adult themes pretty nicely, but they’re mostly glossed over and the overly dark and repressive world that is heavy on a more grounded steampunk presentation only limits the imagination makes the contrast between the light and dark moments not feel warranted. Chris Weitz had only really been attached to comedies like American Pie, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Down to Earth and About a Boy (which he helped co-directed with his brother Paul Weitz and even earned himself an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay), so he seems like a very odd choice for this kind of film and he doesn’t really do a good job selling himself (even to the point that he originally walked off the film before returning after Pullman himself asked him to return). The film is paced in such an awkward way where certain parts that feel like they deserve more attention get sidelined and boring topics that aren’t very engaging get overly long scenes where it wasn’t needed. The film was also way too dependent and confident that it would get a sequel that would never come because the film seems to end unfinished with a lot of unexplained questions and plot lines set up that are never explored, which makes even more sense when you find out that the final three chapters of The Northern Lights were moved to the film’s potential sequel, actively leaving out the ending of its own story as to force it into a sequel which just feels so ridiculous as well as incredibly manipulative.

The characters and too rushed to be developed and instead feel like basic cartoon characters that aren’t made to feel the most fleshed out, but in the film’s defense, some do benefit from this direction. Many of the side characters, though not given much personality, attention, or development, have a certain simple charm to them that at least keeps the audience invested despite the lack of characterization.  Most of the interest doesn’t come through the writing or story, but mainly through the actors, and this film is filled with a lot of top-notch actors that are criminally underused. Its bizarre to see a lot of these names on something that would turn out to be such a flop, but with the rise of high-budgeted fantasy film franchises, it does kind of make sense why they would take this gamble. People like Christopher Lee, Kathy Bates, Daniel Craig, Ian McShane, and Douglas Seale aren’t involved in much if any parts of this movie and though they do well in their small parts, it could have used a lot more of them. Charlie Rowe as Lyra’s friend and Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra are pretty bland and isn’t made to be a very interesting lead, but the actors aren’t given much to work with. Freddy Highmore is passable enough as the support, but feels completely useless in this film, and despite being an element to the overall story that should be crucial and feel very important to the overall story, not a lot would be missed if he was cut out entirely. Nicole Kidman is a lot of fun as Mrs. Coulter, though she is also not very well written, she has such a deviously intense stare always planted on her face and she clearly enjoys being the evil one and goes all the way with it, it’s great  to watch. Sam Elliot as the Gunslinger is very underused and not very well characterized, but Elliot has a gruffness that draws audiences attention, and Ian McKellen as the Polar Bear, though not that good looking, beings a lot of weight to all his words and is one of the few characters to be given a full characters arc in the film, so that is at least appreciated. These roles seem to capture the more bizarre fanatical side that the story is trying to go for but can never fully get too.

The effects in this movie are not that impressive to look at, even though they were an element of the film that was given extreme praise when it was released (even winning an Oscar for Best Visual Effects). The locations that the characters go to are so bland and uninteresting that they could easily be replaced with any other rebellion story and the environments are so drenched in dark lighting and supposed realism that no magical places are ever seen. Even though this world with its mixture between retro metropolitan and futuristic steampunk visual design should lead to some cool visuals, and the production design by Dennis Gassner has glimpses of creative flair and specific scenes that look nice in the day time, but don’t look that interesting the more in goes away from the city and still look pretty standard for the genre. The film isn’t without color as there are occasional splashes of yellow, blue and white, but it just feels incredibly muted and dumbed down, lacking anything visually pleasing outside of certain scenes during the final act where there are some nice shots of the snow. The animals look awful, and since one of the main driving points for the movie are the animal companions, they are seen way too often and don’t much better the more screen time they get. To their credit, they are decently expressive and for the time, it feels like they would look pretty cool but even when they go so far to have big fight scenes with dramatic music and heavy atmosphere, it feels more like a video game than something that came from a $180 million movie. The music by Alexandre Desplat is either basic fantasy music or dramatic instrumentals, but it is way too over dramatic and over-accentuates moments that should allow emotions to come through naturally rather than through forceful means. Once and a while the film has some cool shots by cinematographer Henry Braham that show off the environments nicely and adds to the atmosphere that the film is going for. The original story itself was heavily controversial for its depiction or rather its aggressive stance on religion, particularly of the Catholic faith, as its main villainous force was a collective of religiously devout people who were dogmatic in their beliefs, heavily dictated and defined morality within their followers, and committed heinous acts (mainly the children) in secrecy. The film’s removal of this aspect and making the Magisterium represent all forms of dogmatic organisations, resulted in a backlash against fans of the story who saw it is destroying the whole purpose and intent of the book, and Catholic-based groups that still saw the story as damaging to their beliefs. Since other stories have openly expressed opinions on religion both pro and con (Narnia isn’t the most subtle when it comes to its direction), it should be fair game for an author to give their own viewpoint as long as its handled with taste and care, but considering how little of this commentary even rang that hard in the film, it makes all of this backlash feel pretty useless at the end of it all.

Even with the already existing source material, the way that The Golden Compass is portrayed seems to work much better as a book than it does as a movie. You can feel how desperately the studios wanted to turn this into a franchise and capture a similar kind of draw that Lord of the Rings pulled in (even the advertising directly references Lord of the Rings, its really weird), but it didn’t take the time with its own content or give enough respect to its source material to properly earn it. The magical elements aren’t really dived into that much, and the political struggles aren’t interesting enough to distract from the sloppy exposition and the confusing narrative. Many of the actors are either bland to watch, not given enough time to develop interest, or are just underused all together, with a few exceptions. That mixed with the mundane environments, bad effects, and annoying ‘’to be continued’’ ending results in a largely forgettable attempt at bringing a book faithfully to the big screen. Though in its boredom,  there is possibilities that could have resulting in a fun movie, it just wasn’t fully realized. Not matter how many ways you look at this one, this movie is anything but golden.