The Golden Compass: A Public Service Announcement

New Line Cinema is attempting to repeat the success of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies with an adaptation of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials, beginning with the release of The Golden Compass this weekend. Leading up to the release, the Catholic League and like-minded organizations have tried to warn the public away from the movie, on the ground that the source material is hostile to religion. Knowing the danger, New Line and writer/director Chris Weitz have bowdlerized the books (so I understand, not having read them) to make the story less obviously anticlerical. So far, the Catholic League is unappeased. It's leader William Donohue, one of the nation's biggest nuisances, considers it unsafe to view even a sanitized rendering of Pullman's work, because doing so might encourage people to buy and read the originally offensive books.

Having heard all this, I was determined to pay my matinee money and see the movie as a matter of principal. I headed out to the theater with some trepidation, however, because the first reviews I read had not been enthusiastic. I emerged mostly reassured.

In terms of production design the film is beautifully realized, setting us in a fantasy world quite different from the usual pseudo-medieval archetype. Here is an alternate universe that seems culturally stuck around 1900, with some enhancements like gyroscope carriages and motorized airships as a commonplace, and with talking, tool-making bears in place of the expected elves and dwarves. The actress Dakota Blue Richards, who plays the young heroine, is very good at holding the film together. This is a children's movie that adults can watch without embarrassment, and kids should enjoy the interaction of characters with their soul-animals. Thinking commercially, this movie seems like a natural for toy and fast-food tie-ins, but I don't see much evidence of any exploitation, perhaps because the people who promoted the daylights out of the Tolkien films fear the wrath of the Catholic League.

As it turns out, you would have to be a hard-core Catholic to even realize that your dogma is even implicitly insulted by this film. Donohue's complaint now boils down to the preservation of the name "Magisterium" for the authoritarian bad guys, since the word also has significance for the Catholic tradition. Nearly every other viewer, meanwhile, will see the Magisterium as a merely generic and secular tyranny, and few are likely to see any religious or irreligious significance in all the talk of "dust" and its metaphysical potential. Reduced to its basics, The Golden Compass is a typical story of young rebellion and search for identity in a repressive environment surrounded by wonder, with talking, tool-making, whiskey-swilling bears, and Sam Elliot as a cowboy. Technically, Elliot is an "aeronaut," but who are they kidding?

Because I haven't read Pullman's books, the movie didn't seem like mere illustration of a familiar story to me, as was the case with the otherwise excellent No Country For Old Men. Free from any concern for fidelity to the source, and knowing already that it was in some ways unfaithful, I could judge the screenplay on its own merits. While I liked most of what I saw, I was left thinking that the producers must have run out of time or money. Some subplots are resolved (or not) in a perfunctory manner, while the big battle scene at the end seems rushed as far as editing and effects are concerned. It's sometimes obvious that scenes set on the icy wastes are filmed indoors on a soundstage, but the characters usually take your mind off this knowledge. The story is incomplete, but that's too be expected from the first part of an expected trilogy. There is closure in the sense that our heroine accomplishes an important task, and her resolution to do another brings the curtain down perhaps too optimistically.

Since the Tolkien project, two attempts at fantasy series films, Lemony Snicket and Eragon, have died after one episode, and neither had the active enmity facing His Dark Materials. I went to an early show at the area's most popular shopping mall today, and the place was about a quarter full. Maybe it was too early for the best crowds (11:40 a.m.), but maybe it's too late for this film. That would be a shame, because it was worthwhile despite its flaws, and it would be doubly shameful if William Donohue gets to boast that he and his faithful killed the trilogy in its cradle. My recommendation is: don't give this idiot any satisfaction -- go to the movie instead.