For all the furor surrounding its release, the film version of Philip Pullman’s fantasy novel The Golden Compass (the first in the author’s His Dark Materials trilogy) turns out to be completely tame, which may be helpful in placating its most vocal critics but does not make for the most exciting or interesting movie. Screenwriter and director Chris Weitz seems to have not only taken out or severely toned down all of the potentially offensive anti-religious content, but also removed quite a bit of the action while keeping nearly all the exposition. The result is a movie with characters constantly explaining arcane concepts and only rarely doing anything about them.
Starting with a voice-over from spunky tween heroine Lyra (newcomer Dakota Blue Richards) going over some of the fantasy world’s basic concepts, Weitz sets the tone for a movie set in a world much like ours, but with many more complicated magical goings-on. The orphaned Lyra lives at tweedy Jordan College in alternate-world Oxford, England, occasionally visited by her distant (both physically and emotionally) uncle Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), an explorer investigating a mystical substance called Dust.
Lyra is quickly whisked away from Jordan by the charming Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) to work as her ostensible apprentice for a pending voyage to the frozen northern land of Svalbard. It isn’t long, though, before Lyra discovers that Mrs. Coulter is at the head of a conspiracy to kidnap children and do something nasty to them, all related to the discovery and fear of Dust by the world’s ruling organization, the Magisterium. Also, there are talking, armored bears; seafaring nomads called Gyptians; flying, bow-wielding witches; and a cowboy/hot-air-balloon pilot played by Sam Elliott.
It’s all a little much, and Weitz rushes through it like it’s a race, turning in a film much shorter than your typical fantasy epic, but also much less satisfying. He stops short of the book’s actual ending in order to close on a more upbeat note, but the final fade-out seems abrupt and unfair; it’s unresolved, and there isn’t even a decent cliffhanger to entice you into the (hypothetical) next chapter. You leave the theater not wondering what might happen next, but pondering just what the hell Dust was supposed to be, exactly.
All of that is a lot clearer in Pullman’s novel, which is still drowning in exposition but at least has a well-defined point of view, with an explicit connection between the Magisterium and the Catholic church, and the definition of Dust as the manifestation of sin. It’s a little heavy-handed, really, and makes plain Pullman’s intent to write a counterpoint to C.S. Lewis’ Christian-allegory Chronicles of Narnia, but it does manage to set the story apart from any number of other sprawling fantasy tales about prophesied chosen ones who must save the world from evil forces.
The movie version has no such distinction, and while Richards is charming, she can’t carry the weight of all that story on her own, nor can she quite convincingly act alongside all the impressive but somewhat antiseptic special effects. Kidman is perfectly cast as the icy villain, but the adult characters don’t get nearly as much screen time as the advertising may have indicated. Like so many recent fantasy films, Compass has more than its share of ambition, but Weitz, whose previous experience is as a co-filmmaker of relationship comedies (American Pie, About a Boy) with his brother Paul, gets lost in the scope, delivering a movie without focus, a pretty, baffling spectacle about serious events that goes out of its way to say nothing at all.
The Golden Compass
** 1/2
Dakota Blue Richards, Nicole Kidman, Sam Elliott, Daniel Craig
Directed by Chris Weitz
Rated PG-13
Opens Friday