The more movies I watch, the more I'm amazed at the number of movies that I somehow have never heard of. Movies come and go so quicky, and it seems like if they don't latch on and make an impression quickly, they are sometimes never discovered.
The Golden Compass seems to be one of those forgotten films, even though it received a 4/4 rating from Roger Ebert when it was first released. (Maybe there's a reason some films are forgotten... see below.)The basic premise is pretty cool. We live in a multiverse, but there's no real way to "prove" it, let alone travel to parallel universes. In the movie, people's souls live in "spirit animals" that travel with them outside their bodies. The spirit animals of children have the ability to change, only locking into one specific form upon adulthood.
Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) has a plan to prove the existence of parallel universes, and even to travel to one. The Powers That Be would rather this not happen. All Golden Compasses save one have been destroyed. The Powers worry about the proof of doctrine that goes against centuries of teaching, doctrine that would weaken their authority. Of course, they want to "protect" the people from the harm that new information would bring. The want to protect people from freewill, and they will go to extreme lengths to make sure people are safe -- even if they have to remove something from them that essentially would change them from human to animal.
Where have we heard this before? The story is fantasy, but the subject matter is all too real.
All that said, this should have been the first movie in a trilogy, and by the time you reach the end of The Golden Compass, the end would be okay if this was actually the first movie, but since the sequels were never made, it feels terribly incomplete. That's what ultimately kills this movie, I think. Great opening premise, but limited payoff without the next two movies to complete the trilogy.
But anyway, as I watched The Golden Compass, I was interested in how people pick their spirit animals (daemons). What do they represent? Why do they have their own names, and why do they not necessarily match the gender of the person? None of this is explained.
Finally, I would add that this is a movie with a $180 million budget, and most of it must have gone for CGI. In terms of character and character development, it's hard to care about CGI polar bears. Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) gives Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) information about who her parents are, but we never really know if she is telling Lyra the truth.
At the end, the battle won, Lyra heads off with Lee (Sam Elliott) in his blimp, but what about the kids they just fought a battle over to save from the medical facility? Did they just leave them there? Too much left unexplored and unexplained. Lord Asriel essentially disappears after the opening sequence, maybe making a brief appearance in a scene or two... one assumes he would reemerge as a significant character in the sequels, but his absence for most of this movie is just another problematic detail for this movie as a standalone.
So, the concepts and ideas are interesting, and I'll probably read the books to get a better sense of what this story is really about. I also understand that HBO made a series of His Dark Materials (2019, 23 episodes), and it has a much higher IMDb rating (7.7/10)
Rating: 1.5/5 stars
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