Ross TenEyck (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ross_teneyck) wrote,@ 2007-12-30 00:32:00 |
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The Golden Compass
If you've read the book, there's a conversation right at the very end of the movie that is particularly and rather cruelly ironic.
But be that as it may, I finally got a chance to see this, and... it's OK. The visuals are all great, they got good actors for all the parts -- especially Lyra -- but I think the movie suffered from the fact that the plot of the book is just a bit too complex to fit into a movie. And if you start cutting out major subplots, you leave out stuff that's just too cool not to have in the movie; like the panserbjørne and the fight between Iorek Byrnison and Iofur Raknison -- which was the highlight of the movie, if you ask me.
But the result is that the movie is crowded with events without a lot of the connecting material between them, and if you hadn't read the book I imagine you'd spend a lot of time not being entirely clear as to why characters were doing what they were doing.
I suspect that this has a lot more to do with why it's tanking at the box office than the fact that it's anti-Christian. (Well, the book is, anyway; the movie is a little squeamish about coming right out and saying it.)
Given the disappointing ticket sales, I doubt we'll see the sequels... which is kind of a pity, because the next two books get a whole lot more explicit about who the bad guy is (that would be God1), and I was ever so curious to see how they were going to handle that in the movies.
Anyway, it looked good and I enjoyed watching it, but this flick is not in the same league as the LotR or Narnia movies.
1Well, sort of. It's Pullman's notion of God, which actually doesn't have that much to do with what most people who believe in God believe in. In fact, although Pullman doesn't seem to be aware of it, his "God" figure is a much better match for Satan in Christian mythology; if you want, you can easily read the trilogy as being set in an alternate reality where Lucifer won his bid to take over Heaven.
If you've read the book, there's a conversation right at the very end of the movie that is particularly and rather cruelly ironic.
But be that as it may, I finally got a chance to see this, and... it's OK. The visuals are all great, they got good actors for all the parts -- especially Lyra -- but I think the movie suffered from the fact that the plot of the book is just a bit too complex to fit into a movie. And if you start cutting out major subplots, you leave out stuff that's just too cool not to have in the movie; like the panserbjørne and the fight between Iorek Byrnison and Iofur Raknison -- which was the highlight of the movie, if you ask me.
But the result is that the movie is crowded with events without a lot of the connecting material between them, and if you hadn't read the book I imagine you'd spend a lot of time not being entirely clear as to why characters were doing what they were doing.
I suspect that this has a lot more to do with why it's tanking at the box office than the fact that it's anti-Christian. (Well, the book is, anyway; the movie is a little squeamish about coming right out and saying it.)
Given the disappointing ticket sales, I doubt we'll see the sequels... which is kind of a pity, because the next two books get a whole lot more explicit about who the bad guy is (that would be God1), and I was ever so curious to see how they were going to handle that in the movies.
Anyway, it looked good and I enjoyed watching it, but this flick is not in the same league as the LotR or Narnia movies.
1Well, sort of. It's Pullman's notion of God, which actually doesn't have that much to do with what most people who believe in God believe in. In fact, although Pullman doesn't seem to be aware of it, his "God" figure is a much better match for Satan in Christian mythology; if you want, you can easily read the trilogy as being set in an alternate reality where Lucifer won his bid to take over Heaven.
