Lost
posted on Thursday, December 06, 2007 in Movie Reviews
Like many recent fantasy adaptations, The Golden Compass is absolutely gorgeous, entirely watchable, but also a bit of a mess. Taking a few too many storytelling shortcuts, the film may make audiences feel like they missed a whole lot of story. The Golden Compass is an adaptation of the first book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It tells the story of a parallel world where people’s souls manifest as companion animals called daemons. In this world, young Lyra Belacqua gets caught up in a great conspiracy to suppress free thought as she goes on a quest to search for missing children and something called “Dust,” from which everything in the universe was created.
There’s a lot of story to get through, and you can really feel it as you sit through the film. There are just too many things going on, none of which ever reach their full potential as plot lines. There is a feeling that they just picked the all the “cool” stuff from the book and stuffed them together in a script with no regard whatsoever for good storytelling. The script takes a lot of shortcuts to get from one cool thing to another, and while this whiz-bang sort of storytelling can be entertaining for a while, it does get tiresome.
The cool stuff really is cool, though. The production design in this film is absolutely wonderful. It’s a glorious combination of high-technology and clockwork aesthetics, and it all works. The action scenes (especially with the armored bears) are pretty great, and all this adds up to a completely watchable film, if a little shallow.
Yes, shallow, and that’s kind of disappointing. There are some very interesting ideas in the book (and the film), but it all takes a backseat to the action and the production design. One feels that a little more restraint in the script could have given us a pretty intelligent film targeted for younger audiences, which a rarity these days.
The performances are uniformly good, as is expected from a cast like this. Dakota Blue Richards is a charming little girl, and with a little more time, she could be a pretty good actress. As of right now, she does just well enough to be all right. The rest of the cast, which includes Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman, all do their jobs admirably.
The Golden Compass is an okay film; it just isn’t great. One does feel, however, that the next parts of the trilogy could be better, and that there’s actually a lot to look forward to. All the right elements for greatness are there, but the script was just lacking. But maybe they’ll learn something in the next year or so, and we may get the proper film.
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