The Golden Compass.

"The Golden Compass has more snap and personality - at its bear-centric best, wintry and strange - than that Narnia movie but lacks the sophistication of the post-Columbus Harry Potter series," writes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine. "Enjoyable but thin, the film ends as it begins: with exposition, only now the characters explain what's supposed to happen next time. The filmmakers are so busy preparing us for an epic adventure that they crowd out the audience's sense of discovery."

"Desperate to retain as many of his source material's details as possible, writer-director Chris Weitz crams his story full of magical terms and concepts with a rapidity that leaves things confusing and thus meaningless, his film's breathless pace allowing for none of the gradual narrative build-up (or character establishment) that might give the later, cataclysmic events any sense of import," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

Updated through 12/9.

"[W]hile some of the explanations - and, in fact, the film itself - seem a tad rushed, The Golden Compass is a breathtakingly exciting creation of a thrilling universe and its characters," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC.

"Pulling even the diaphanously cloaked punches of the book, Weitz avoids Compass's one relatively direct indictment (involving Adam, Eve, and a pile of bollocks called 'Original Sin') altogether by having the film end three crucial chapters before the book does," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice. "Those punches, unfortunately, are intrinsic to Compass's valorous narrative fight (i.e., trying to get kids to swallow some sense with their fantasy). By insisting on many of Pullman's heady conceits but diluting the doctrinal antidote encoded within them, the intricate plot becomes an empty challenge. In drawing and quartering much of the novel's intent, Weitz ends up with a film that feels not just unfinished but undone."

"[T]here's something deeply unsatisfying about an ending that explicitly promises a confrontation that it declines to deliver," adds Bryant Frazer.

Online listening tip. "There are a lot of hysterical Christians out there speaking in ignorance about Pullman’s books and the upcoming film," writes Jeffrey Overstreet, pointing to Ken Myers's interview with literary critic Alan Jacobs. "But there are also some Christians offering perceptive examinations of the stories... at least as perceptive, if not more so, than any other reviews yet published."

Weitz is "helping the industry further infantilize film culture," argues Armond White in the New York Press.

Updates, 12/6: "The neutering of Pullman's most pointed atheistic and anticlerical themes raises the possibility that the book's most fervent fans may be the ones who get angry," suggests Zack Smith in the Independent Weekly.

"In a nutshell, a lot of shit goes down in The Golden Compass, and very little gets explained to audiences unfamiliar with the book," writes Jonathan Busch in Vue Weekly. "And surprisingly, that's fine, as the fictional wonderland is alluring in its unfettering mystery and senselessness."

"I swear, if I wasn't a grown woman with a freakish love for juvenile fiction involving magic, British children, talking animals, and MAGIC - if I hadn't already read this book (twice, okay? and maybe once on audiobook!) - I would be so confused right now," admits Lindy West in the Stranger.

"[Peter] Jackson created a world, but Weitz settles for setpieces," writes Peter Chattaway for Christianity Today. "The filmmakers have been at pains lately to say that they toned down the book's anti-religious content, and that may be true to the extent that the movie never uses words like 'church' or 'God.' But the word 'magisterium' does refer, in the real world, to the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church, and the film is still peppered with religiously significant words like 'oblation' and 'heresy,' as well as a cryptic reference to 'our ancestors' who 'disobeyed the Authority' - that is, to Adam and Eve and their disobedience against God in the Garden of Eden."

Updates, 12/7: "The Golden Compass has many of the virtues of a faithful screen adaptation and many of the predictable flaws," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Agnostics and atheists may, for starters, regret the explicit absence of the Church (others may see lingering traces), but the movies have never been a particularly good pulpit for any gods other than those of cinema's own creation. It's a tradition that this film honors with a goddess of icy perfection played by the wickedly well-cast Nicole Kidman.... The sequels are a welcome idea, if only because they might persuade Mr Weitz and his team to take it slower next time."

"This is the kind of movie that was made by throwing dollars at stuff, as opposed to using imagination, thought or even just common sense," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Whatever complex or interesting ideas might have been found in the source material have been watered down, skimmed over, mashed into nonsense or simply ignored."

Slate's Dana Stevens decided to go in without having read the book "because Pullman's fictional universe seemed so sui generis, so dazzlingly weird, that I wanted to see if the movie could establish that universe's laws and logic on its own terms. I'm here to tell you that, without at least a working knowledge of the Dark Materials cosmos, Weitz's adaptation is a near-impenetrable murk, a blur of CGI beasties, shimmering dust clouds, and vaguely mystical blather."

"I came prepared for a mixture of storytelling exuberance and intellectual irreverence - a sort of Paradise Lost for the Dawkins era," writes the Independent's Anthony Quinn. "It doesn't end up like that."

"For the prickly atheists, the Pullman authenticity police and for myself, I will get this out of the way first: God and the Bible are nowhere in the movie version of The Golden Compass," announces Hanna Rosin, writer of that Atlantic article, "How Hollywood Saved God." "Nothing in the movie should make the Pope blanch or America's self-appointed censors ring the theater in protest. One Christian reviewing site did warn this week that 'the real goal is to lead young, impressionable minds into the deception of atheism.' But this is a preemptive objection based on the trilogy of books, which reach many layers deeper than the movie in their subversion, sense of danger and intellectual scope."

"When it comes to conjuring another world," writes Andrew Stuttaford in the New York Sun, "the very literalness of computer-generated imagery can conspire against it, especially when it has to compete with author-generated imagery such as this:

"...The main interest of the picture lay in the sky. Streams and veils of light hung like curtains, looped and festooned on invisible hooks hundreds of miles high or blowing out sideways in the stream of some unimaginable wind...

"When Mr Pullman is good, he is very good. The film, by contrast, is just okay."

"The Golden Compass is a darker, deeper fantasy epic than the Rings trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia or the Potter films," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "It springs from the same British world of quasi-philosophical magic, but creates more complex villains and poses more intriguing questions."

"[T]hough it takes some doing, The Golden Compass retains enough tastes and traces of the original to fascinate and involve viewers," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "This is especially important because, as opposed to, for instance, The Lord of the Rings or even the Harry Potter books, this is a noticeably cool story, one whose most memorable connections are intellectual rather than emotional."

"There's a lot to like about Weitz's adaptation, and while not all of it has to do with the fussed-over production design and relentless CGI effects, more of its virtues are tied up in those than should be," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

Rick Bentley profiles Sam Elliott for the Fresno Bee. Via Movie City News.

For Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens profiles the author:

He lives in the haunted medieval city of Oxford. In this ancient setting, the rules of childhood fiction were long ago laid down and reinforced. The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, sent a pretty little girl down an Oxford rabbit hole into Wonderland (and beguiled his own lazy hours by taking photographs of her contemporaries which might now be banned from the Internet). Lewis pushed a group of children through a hole in his wardrobe. Tolkien reworked the Norse myths into a cumbersome Baggins saga. All three were ostentatious Christians, and they did their stuff in Oxford, a town which had been the Civil War capital of King Charles I, the last upholder of the divine right of kings. Philip Pullman is an unbeliever and a republican, and he says bullshit to all this - let us storm the heights of heaven and put humanity on the throne.

"The look of the film is not the problem," writes Mike Russell. "No, the problem is the story. Because the thrust of the story (which stops a few chapters short of the juicy ending of Pullman's book, by the way) is this:

1. Lyra gets taken to various exotic locales by older, cooler characters who tell her their exciting stories and then promptly disappear.
2. Lyra occasionally looks into a sort of super-secret clockwork Game Boy called an 'alethiometer' and catches glimpses of exciting stories involving those same older, cooler characters.

"As this beautiful, boring movie wears on, this fundamental story problem starts getting kind of ridiculous."

"Whatever The Golden Compass is, this PG-13 film is not for young children," warns Premiere's Deborah Day. "Despite trailers showing Nicole Kidman knee-deep in wee ones and furry CG creations flitting about as if animating a fantasy romper room, Compass's better parts - which will alternately be missed by and potentially traumatize kids - subsist of high-minded allegorical pronouncements and gruesome twists (the polar bear fight gets particularly nasty) in the story's unnatural universe."

New York's Vulture's got some online viewing; via Ray Pride: "[T]his neutered adaptation of the first entry in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy will probably not kill God or turn America's children into atheists like the Catholic League promised. But given half a chance, any of the films on our list of the Ten Most Anti-Christian Movies of All Time just might." The video they thought would go down has indeed gone down.

Update, 12/9: "If moviegoers are unaware of the Is-God-Bad? debate, they simply will not notice any theological elements, pro or con," writes Richard Corliss for Time, the newsweekly that once famously asked, "Is God Dead?" Corliss: "That's how rigorously Weitz has secularized and sanitized the novel.... The movie lacks an elevating passion, a cohesive vision, a soul. It's as if The Golden Compass has misplaced its artistic compass. Somebody stole its daemon."

Posted by dwhudson at December 5, 2007 1:18 PM