In the 1990s, His Dark Materials, a trilogy by Phillip Pullman, muscled its way into the same niche of endearment for quasi-philosophical fantasy that was fatefully discovered by JK Rowling with Harry Potter and co. These books, admittedly unread by me, presume to deal with deeper issues than the Potter films, the Rings trilogy or The Chronicles of Narnia – on the evidence of the film here, no less than the collective free will is at stake. The books have also got going for them the largely unfounded notoriety of being anti-church, so with high-brow controversy and a best-seller pedigree assured, New Line Cinema set out to capitalise on moviegoers’ seeming lust for fantasy worlds rendered in majestic computer-generated imagery.
The Golden Compass, the film based on the first book of Pullman’s trilogy, is stacked with stars, effects and ideas and predictably suffers from the same ills that most first installments of potential franchises do. It has got too much to tell and too little time to do justice to the source book’s ideas. These shortcomings may dissolve into the arc of a full cinematic trilogy, but will this film enthrall the audiences enough for the remaining two installments to be green-lighted? It will, but only just. The spectacle on display is impressive enough, but it is confusing and cold, always keeping the viewer at arm’s length and never allowing one to submerge oneself fully in the world depicted the way Middle Earth or Hogwarts did.
The story takes place in a world resembling our own, but with fantastical twists lurking around every corner. Central to the events unfolding is a special girl by the name of Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards). She is an orphan raised in Jordan College, an Oxbridge institution of sorts, with one respected relative to count on. This is Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), who claims to have discovered “dust, a special substance, I think, which may allow one to travel between parallel worlds, possibly even into our own”.
This puts him at odds with the Magisterium, an organisation depicted as a bastard child of the Church and a communist party, which dreams of a world full of obliviously happy citizens. Lyra is enticed by the menacingly beautiful Magisterium functionary Mrs Coulter (Nicole Kidman) to accompany her on a trip “up north”. Said madame has a hidden agenda and appears to be related to the continuous disappearance of children, which befalls Lyra’s best friend Roger (Ben Walker). Lyra’s feisty temper helps her see Mrs Coulter’s true colours and she embarks on a quest to find her friend by way of finding her true calling. Lyra earns a number of peculiar companions along the way: an armoured bear named Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Ian McKellen), an aeronaut with a Texas drawl named Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott), the Gyptian king John Faa (Jim Carter) and the witch queen Serafina Pekkala (Eva Green). Lyra is also entrusted with a peculiar object resembling a compass called alethiometer, which is able to answer truthfully any question and therefore feared and sought after by the Magisterium.
The most interesting concept in the film and the books on which it is based has got to be the existence of daemons – external expressions of ones character or soul, if you will, which take the form of an animal and which can argue, fight, dispense advise and do all kinds of other handy things. The daemons of children can shift shapes and settle into permanent form in adolescence when a person’s character is more or less formed for life. Said daemons play a key role in the proceedings both as characters and as a focus for the story and are fascinating to behold. The confusing aspect of the film is its vision, which looks like an expensive yet shy imagining of a Jules Verne book. It is rooted into visual concepts of our own world, but this prevents us from immersing ourselves fully into its fantastical scapes.
Many of the roles are handed out to top stars, but few have time to make an impression, let alone develop and define a character we can care about. Christopher Lee and Derek Jacobi make disappointingly fleeting appearances, McKellen and Ian McShane are present only as booming baritones, Craig’s Lord Asriel is obviously meant to play a more significant part in the next installment, while Green, gorgeous as she is, is little more than a dramatic “get out of jail free” card. Only Kidman is allowed to shine and she duly obliges while young newcomer Richards shows the pluck and innate authority her role requires. However, whether she actually possesses all the talent all her co-stars believe her to have, she remains to be seen and proven in the upcoming installments. Just like they, and not The Golden Compass alone, will have to prove whether this venture deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Lord of the Rings or Narnia or Harry Potter.
