The Golden Compass
Posted on 12.08.07 11:40PM under Entertainment
I just came home from watching the movie The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. I am a sucker for fantasy films like the popular trilogies of The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix and X-Men that is why I didn’t let this movie pass.
The story involves an orphan named Lyra who lives in a fantastical parallel universe wherein a dictative Magisterium threatens to preponderate. When her best mate Roger Parslow was kidnapped, together with other children, and brought to the North, she made significant decisions which led her to rescue him. Along the way, she met several people who played a big part in her journey like the armored bear Loric Byrnison (voice of Ian Mckellen) whom she had a contract with, Serafina Pekkala (Eva Green) who was the queen of the witches, a Texan “aeronaut” (Sam Elliot) who helped Lyra in her quest and many others.
The Golden Compass is the first installment of Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, in which the pre-publication title was actually The Golden Compasses. The word compasses originally referred to the drawing instrument instead of the navigational compass. The first book was then entitled by Pullman as the Northern Lights and referred to the trilogy as The Golden Compasses. It was the U.S. publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, who omitted the plural form of the title as he believed that the compass refers to Lyra’s alethiometer. Meanwhile in the UK, Pullman changed the title from The Golden Compasses to His Dark Materials but the title The Golden Compass adhered to the publishers and they insisted on publishing the book with the latter title rather than The Northern Lights. When The Golden Compass gained popularity in the United States and Canada, New Line Cinema used this title for the adaptation.
What I can say about the movie is that it did not really meet my expectation. There was a sense of thrill, excitement and anticipation but these feelings that I encountered did not reach their peaks. The fighting scenes were not as action-packed and dramatic like the popular trilogies that I have seen. The ending was similar to the Lord of the Rings trilogy whereby people were kept hanging somewhere as they wait for the next installment. There was not any strong character which exudes the heroic aura that I found in the past films. There was something refreshing about it though whereby the idea of a human being having an animal counterpart (referred to as daemons) was introduced instead of having human souls. I could say that the movie is beautiful still in its own right. I still suggest that you watch it yourself, who knows you may have an entirely opposite opinion as mine.
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