The Golden Compass

[December 5th, 2007]

The genre of special-effects extravaganzas based on YA fantasy novels is getting out of hand. We’ve had five already this year, from The Seeker to Stardust , and now Chris Weitz (About a Boy ) wants us to watch one more: his long-delayed adaptation of the first volume of Philip Pullman’s lauded His Dark Materials trilogy. So what’s The Golden Compass got to offer that this year’s other magical-puberty pics didn’t? To put it briefly, Nicole Kidman, polar bears and a boycott from the Catholic League.

It’s the last one that’s going to make or break this film. Pullman’s books, in which an 11-year-old girl named Lyra, aided by talking animals and pursued by evil priests, sets out to understand the secrets of the universe and—here’s the tricky bit—kill God, have been roundly condemned by conservative blowhards on both sides of the Atlantic. It doesn’t much matter that Weitz’s script has ditched the theological specifics and replaced the big bad church with a sort of Masonic version of Orwell’s Ingsoc. The fundies see the film as a gateway drug to the humanist heroin of Pullman’s blasphemous Biblical allegory, and will damn well make sure that the God Question will dominate discussion of the film.

And that’s too bad, because Weitz has made a pretty good movie. His Lyra, played by Dakota Blue Richards, tackles the role with a petulant ambition that rivals Ivana Baquero’s turn in Pan’s Labyrinth . Nicole Kidman is delightfully creepy as the ghoulish scientist Mrs. Coulter, and Sam Elliott makes an absurdist appearance as Lee the flying cowboy. Sure, the dialogue tends toward exposition of the most brutal variety—at one point Daniel Craig, sporting a prickly beard, crests a hill and declares to the empty arctic wastes, “Ah, Svalbard! Land of the Ice Bears!”—but Compass is leagues better than most films in the genre. That’s thanks in part to some truly stunning art direction, but also to Weitz’s tactful avoidance of drawn-out, mind-numbing action sequences. You won’t find any oceans of orcs or broom acrobatics here; just one snowy skirmish and a short bear-fight that are each more effective than anything out of Peter Jackson’s blood-soaked martial fantasies.

The Catholic League is right on one count, though: Every kid who sees the film this weekend will have finished the books by January. And that’s a good thing. PG-13.