Golden Compass
I'm off to see The Golden Compass this afternoon with Baby G. I am quite excited, not only because it is a film version of one of my favorite books (and series) but also because it's considered by some religious groups to be "controversial" because of it's atheist (gasp!) themes. Ooooh. And apparently atheist groups think the movie isn't atheist enough. [Eye-roll.] You can't please anyone any of the time.
I'll post a review later.
3 comments:
So what did you think? The C-A's John Beifuss gave it a tepid if polite review. The more entertaining piece was his interview with Sam Elliott.
i happen to think it was great! on my fantasy/kid's movie scale, it's an "A." Sam Elliott is my favorite cowboy...i think i fell in love with him as Wade Garrett in Road House of all things. all the other characters were also well cast.
i really wasn't sure how it was going to turn out when they announced they were going to do this movie, as it is conceptually fairly complicated, particularly for a kid's book. it's like Wrinkle in Time, tesseract complicated, and of course there were those "controversial" elements about the church and such. i thought they did a great job capturing the spirit of the book into 1hr & 53mins, and had a lot of fun watching it. i'm really thankful Disney didn't ruin this one for me.
Yes, it was definitely a fun movie and the young actor portraying Lyra did an excellent job; however, I felt it lacked the depth it needed to compete with the story as told in the book. That said, I think the film came off a touch cartoon-y. By trying to avoid the "controversy" of showing "the church" in a bad light and nixing that flavor in favor of a vague authoritative institution, the filmmakers watered down the story and the villains frankly weren't all that villainous. Mostly they were dudes in long gowns with bad comb-overs.
If the film had been a bit longer, perhaps the characters could have been more developed and more background details could have been shown/explained. I will say the action sequences were intense and thrilling and the set design and costumes were great. The feeling of an alternate universe was certainly present in the film, but the ambiguous "Magisterium" lacked the backing of real fear.
I have hope, though, for the remaining two installments. If they are made, that is. I hope they are, and I hope the filmmakers grow some melons in the meantime and stop dancing around the subject of religious totalitarianism and make thrilling films about free will and its consequences.
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