The Golden Compass
January 3, 2008
Jay asks if The Golden Compass is worth seeing.
Yes it is, and the book is definitely worth reading as well.
The film is absolutely gorgeous: the atmosphere and the scenery are amazing. It would be worth watching even with the sound off, just to see Phillip Pullman’s universe brought to life. The daemons and panzerbjorn, the alethiometers and airships are there in all their glory.
Combine all that with terrific actors who rise to the occasion — James Bond once again teams up with the insanely hot Eva Green — and it hardly matters that the movie ends ten minutes early, and omits the not-nearly-so-happy ending of the book.
His Dark Materials have often been compared to the Chronicles of Narnia, not least because Pullman has made a hobby of accusing C.S. Lewis of worshiping a “god who hates life”, and pretending not to understand what happens to Susan at the end of the Narnia series.
This irritating habit of the author notwithstanding, The Golden Compass is a very good book. It’s fair to call it an atheist’s version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The author’s theology and beliefs underlie the story, give it life, and make it succeed. Whether one agrees with those beliefs is beside the point: it’s a work of art, and one’s life is the richer for having enjoyed it.
The Subtle Knife, while good, is not nearly as good as its predecessor. To continue the Narnia analogy to its breaking point, The Subtle Knife is an atheist’s version of The Last Battle: there’s still a rollicking story hidden between the book’s covers, but it’s nearly overwhelmed by the steady encroachment of the author’s philosophical agenda. The preachiness works to the detriment of the story, but the story is strong enough to survive.
The final installment in Pullman’s triology, The Amber Spyglass is where the rot really sets in. Basically, it’s terrible: an atheist’s (deicide’s?) version of the execrable Atlas Shrugged. The story is completely subsumed to the didactic needs of the author, and is undone by preachiness, inconsistent plotting, and a conclusion that is preposterous and laughable, when it should have been sweeping and Miltonic and sic transit gloria mundi. Oh, what it could have been.
But still: if you haven’t yet, go see the movie. You won’t regret it.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:55 am
The book was OK but they took most of the good stuff out of the book when the made the movie. They greatly over simplified the story and took out what made it interesting. Instead of Lyra figuring out her next step, someone told her what to do. They re-ordered the events in the book to have a climatic finish and that took away from the meanings of the events.
If I hadn’t read the book immediately before seeing the movie, I may have said it was an OK movie (still wouldn’t have been a fan) but having just read the book, the movie was horrible (see my points above). It does look reeally nice though with great effects. They just lost the story in the translation to the big screen.
I could continue, but I’ll shut up now. And this review hasn’t been impacted by the topics of the story. I’m still finishing the 3rd book right now.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:30 am
I thought the story translated to the big screen pretty well.
It’s true that Lyra loses a lot of her autonomy in the movie (I hadn’t considered this until you mentioned it, but you’re right), but she’s still spirited, precocious, and an inveterate liar. Her character is right; it’s just that some of her “figuring out” has just been sacrificed to time constraints and the fact that movies are different than books. The alethiometer was cool, but it would have been dull to show it to us seven or eight times.
I’m not really sure what could have been done differently. The stuff that was most unrelated to the main plot, and thus a good candidate for the cutting room floor, was Iorek and the polar bears, but since they’re by far the most memorable part of the book, they had to stay.