The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass movie was…well, almost exactly as I thought it would be from the trailers. It was a fairly entertaining film, but it was a long way from the film I would’ve liked to have seen. While the book seemed like an underdog that managed to develop into something great, the film seemed like it had everything, but messed it up.

It’s just a bad adaptation – I’ve said before that the book doesn’t have a very good story, but meanders and fits in lots of separate threads, but comes together because it’s a superb evocation of a world, with great characters and some superb ideas. Somehow, this film makes all the slightly iffy parts of the book that just about manage to work and throws them into such stark relief that they become quite embarrassing, and fails to evoke any of the redeeming sense of purpose or atmosphere that make the novel hang together.

I’m a strict critic because I read Northern Lights when I was 14, fell in love with the world, and fell in love with Lyra. I enjoyed the screen adaptation, but only because I can see it as a totally different entity from the story I know. It’s beautiful, but that’s not the Jordan College I’m familiar with. That’s not the Lyra Belaqua I care about.

One big problem is the great rush. A novel can take its time, flesh out each idea, develop them with subtlety. Here we get a great infodump for an introduction, and then a great rush of different plot strands colliding but never quite intertwining. I can understand truncating the slow Gyptians segment, which worked, and Lee Scoresby just about managed to seem necessary because Sam Elliot was so striking onscreen, but changing the Witches’ Council to one scene with Serafina just made them so extraneous, removing all emotion from their appearance in the battle – and I’m sure they showed Lord Faa in Serafina’s ‘flashback’ rather than Farder Coram. Lyra’s scenes with her ‘Gang’ were too twee, too babyish, and failed to evoke the sense of long familiarity – too eager to be cute, when what we really needed was cut knees and real scraps with the miner kids or whoever it was in the book. Mrs. Coulter worked well, Nicole Kidman radiant and intriguing, but Lyra’s escape from her was a wasted opportunity for real tension and fear – in the book, there’s a real desperation and fear as Lyra realised how lost and alone she is. Iorek’s fight with…whatever it was they renamed Iofur, Raknaar or something, certainly looked impressive, but was similarly too pat, too easily resolved, too much of an aside rather than being something Lyra really had to do. Because each segment had to be dealt with quickly, none of them get time to develop any atmosphere, and nor do any of the characters gain any depth, including Lyra. Even Mrs. Coulter only shows depth by being contradictory…which is just a teaser.

It doesn’t help that what in Pullman’s book is a cleverly-written evocation of a world that in almost every way is just like our own but subtly different (and with daemons) becomes as otherworldly as possible, with dodgy CG blimps and ridiculous glowing gyroscopes where Pullman’s ‘Anbaric’ energy was quite clearly just electricity.

Otherwise, what I expected from the trailer was true. Lyra is totally wrong. She’s too young, and not nearly wild, tomboyish or pure enough. She seems like a nice middle-class girl putting on a weird accent and generally thinking herself above most of what she does. She doesn’t have Lyra’s easy, honest emotions, and when she’s called upon to show some emotion, Dakota Blue Richards just doesn’t seem to believe in it, making her affection for Iorek seem hollow and…well, what happened with Billy got changed, but she didn’t seem very worried about Ratter, and nor did we see the sheer violation that’s supposed to happen when someone touches Pan.

On the other hand, the things I thought would work do work. Pantalaimon is adorable with Freddie Highmore’s voice, though there was a bit too much focus on him being scared and supported by Lyra, rather than the two of them being matches for one another. He and Iorek for the most part look great in a film where the CG isn’t always as good as it ought to be (the monkey often looks bizarre), and one shot of Pan through a magnifying glass is just superb. The music is generally good, though jangled somewhat when Lyra was running away. Shots of architecture, excepting the obviously-fake Magisterium, are excellent. I don’t really mind that the Church isn’t called the Church; it’s still very obvious, though I was a bit disgruntled that Christopher Lee and Derek Jacobi were quite so hammy. Their faces onscreen looked wonderfully sinister; the effect would actually have been potent without the panto act.

And I really, really hate the fact that they changed the ending. I know the book really climaxes with the bears’ fight, peaks again for a false ending where the film ends, and then finally finishes, but it’s that final smack in the face of what happens next, the sheer enormity of what Asriel does and where it leads us, that lets us see that this series is really something a bit different. The horrible ‘Sailing to our future, listing unresolved plot points,’ we got really annoyed me, and I’m sure vastly reduced the likelihood of many people going to see the sequel.

I’m worried, anyway. If the solid visuals and grit of book one looked a bit ridiculous in this film, what will dementors, fairy warriors, motorbike cattle and gay angels look like? The whole affair just makes me want to squirrel back into the book I loved. Not books – that single, first book, where I know I can find my Lyra.