The Golden Compass
Dec. 2nd, 2007 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhI got to see a special showing of The Golden Compass last night! Yay! I was so excited to see this movie; I first read the books back when I actually was the age they're targeted at, when I was 12 or 13. Well, the first two; by the time the third one came out I was a bit older, and have vivid memories of not sleeping a whole night to tear through it.
First, the good things: pretty much every single actor in this is awesome, and really captures the spirit of their characters. Sam Elliott, as Lee Scorsby, is beyond cool, and I really liked whoever was voicing Hester. Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter is excellent. She somehow manages to do the Mrs. Coulter thing of simultaneously making an appealing and warm first impression, particularly to kids, and being really fucking scary. Her character unfortunately loses some of her complexity, due to changes made to the Magisterium/Church (more on that later), but Kidman does an amazing job.
And finally, Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra is pretty much the best thing ever in the history of things. She is deceitful and fierce and sullen and ruthless and cunning and charismatic and totally, totally Lyra, and I loved it. From the previews, one of the things I’d been expecting the movie to change from the books was that Lyra was going to be cute and sweet and sympathetic, and I was so glad to see that didn’t happen. She lies to the Gyptian children, she lies to the bear king, she lies to Mrs. Coulter, and is always so good at it. She kicks down gates while being chased by Gobblers! She hits people with poles! It is awesome.
The special effects are really good. My other big worry, when I first heard this book was being made into a movie, was that some of essential and best things about it just wouldn’t work on screen, particularly the daemons and the talking bears. But no! The daemons look real and natural and believable. The bears are powerful and scary and wise, just like they should be. Iorek is the exiled king he should be- there’s a change to his backstory that pissed me off, but his voice and appearance are just great.
And now, the much longer list, the bad things: in general, the pacing felt rushed. Everything felt summarized to me. And part of that may have been that I’m familiar with the longer and wider world of the book (which I reread just a few months ago), but I think any viewer would sense that. There’s never enough time given to develop any setting or group of people into the rich, full dimensions they should have, so it all feels shallow. And, you know, it’s a 300 page book into a movie; I get that some things have to be cut. But I’d rather have them cut the gyptians entirely and get a really good look at Bolvangar than have a half-assed attempt at both. And on that note, The Golden Compass is falling into a very particular genre of movies: big fantasy epics that come out at December. Unlike many movies, this genre is allowed to be three hours or longer. The Golden Compass probably ran about an hour and 45 minutes. I think part of that might have been a cut at the end that seems to have been made pretty late in the post-production process (more in a few paragraphs), but dudes, really. You’ve got a book that is loved for its immensely detailed world-building. Give a little more time to flesh that out.
The secularization of the Magisterium actually didn’t bother me much, though undoubtedly this book is the easiest of the trilogy to make that change. Actually, my annoyance with that change is that they didn’t secularize it enough; there’s all sorts of reasons why a political or military authority might be invested in protecting children’s innocence. But having someone say “A long time ago one of our ancestors did something bad” is incoherent and ridiculous if you’re going to refuse to mention Garden of Eden/Original Sin theology. My big problem with the Magisterium in the movie is actually that they’re cartoon villains. In the book, the members of the Magisterium believe that they’re doing something good. They’re aware that they’re harming innocents, but they do think that there’s an end that justifies the means. In the movie, their motives are given only as “they want to control all worlds” and “no one must question our authority”. Those are not the motives of human beings; those are the motives of people who twirl their mustaches and tie girls to railroad tracks. The book’s Magisterium is compelling because of the righteousness and faith of its members; the movie’s Magisterium is just stupid. It particularly harms Mrs. Coulter’s character; her struggle between the Magisterium and Lord Asriel is fascinating in the book, particularly with her history as an adulteress (which is mentioned only extremely briefly in the movie, by the way), but in the movie there’s no reason for anyone to be part of the Magisterium other than Evil. That doesn’t make for interesting character development.
In general, that’s what’s wrong with the whole movie. Not that they secularized it, but that, you know, a dark and complex story couldn’t be marketed for kids. Interviews with some of the people involved have stated that there was market pressure to make a movie that was upbeat and had a happy ending, and I think that did more damage that the bloody Christian Right protests.
The daemons look awesome in the movie, but though we’re told it, the movie never manages to do what the book does: compelling convince us that these things are people’s souls. They’re cool pets, maybe good friends, but I could never feel that they’re an essential part of being human. In the book, by the time you see the people who have had the intercission, it’s horrifying. It’s like zombies, or people whose minds have been wiped. There isn’t that feeling in the movie, which means that the scene where Lyra almost has it happen to her doesn’t have any real power. It felt mostly like it would kinda suck to have your daemon cut away, but in the same sense that it would suck to have your best friend move to another state. There just wasn’t the terrifying and vaguely-sexual/rape overtones to the scene that it needs to have to show the horror of what the Magisterium is doing.
Another reason why I think this doesn’t work is that we don’t really see anyone who’s had the intercission. If the nurses and guards of Bolvanger have had it, like in the book, it’s not mentioned. We do see the little boy Lyra finds in a meat locker (switched from Tony to Billy Costa, but that’s not a change that bothered me) clutching a replacement, but it’s an extremely short scene and, more importantly, HE DOESN’T DIE. You know that entire memorably and heart-wrenching scene where he dies and they prepare to bury him, and Lyra finds they’ve thrown away the cod he was using as a replacement for his daemon, and carves a gold coin with his daemon’s name to bury with him, and if you are human you wept while reading it? ALL GONE! Entirely! She finds him, returns him to the gyptians who promise to get his daemon back, and then it’s never mentioned again.
Which brings me to my most important point. Everything bad about the movie I was willing to forgive and enjoy until we got to this. The entire ending has been cut. The movie ends before Lyra and Roger get to Lord Asriel. Supposedly it’s going to be at the beginning of the next movie (there’s an article in the New York Times about it), but I don’t care. This change utterly violates the entire spirit of the story. Lyra should get to Lord Asriel, who kills Roger, thus fulfilling the prophecy that she’ll betray someone and twisting everything that has gone before from the standard quest narrative into instead a story about innocent lost and a competition between two sides, neither of which can be trusted and each of which is willing to do awful things to achieve their goals. It should be a story about Lyra on her own, about how gaining knowledge throws you out of the place you grew up in. Now The Golden Compass has a fucking happy ending, it ends with Lyra and Roger and Iorek and Lee as a team together, coming straight from achieving victory over Bolvanger, flying into the pretty lights in the airship with swelling music. It is so fundamentally wrong to the spirit of the book, and thankfully people seem aware of that; at my screening, people howled at the screen when the credits came up. The Golden Compass is supposed to be a story about how there aren’t easy answers, and the toll (and joy) of experience, and now it’s not. Now it’s a story about how good always vanquishes evil and then everyone always lives happily ever after, and that’s so far off from the original that I don’t know how Pullman approved it.
First, the good things: pretty much every single actor in this is awesome, and really captures the spirit of their characters. Sam Elliott, as Lee Scorsby, is beyond cool, and I really liked whoever was voicing Hester. Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter is excellent. She somehow manages to do the Mrs. Coulter thing of simultaneously making an appealing and warm first impression, particularly to kids, and being really fucking scary. Her character unfortunately loses some of her complexity, due to changes made to the Magisterium/Church (more on that later), but Kidman does an amazing job.
And finally, Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra is pretty much the best thing ever in the history of things. She is deceitful and fierce and sullen and ruthless and cunning and charismatic and totally, totally Lyra, and I loved it. From the previews, one of the things I’d been expecting the movie to change from the books was that Lyra was going to be cute and sweet and sympathetic, and I was so glad to see that didn’t happen. She lies to the Gyptian children, she lies to the bear king, she lies to Mrs. Coulter, and is always so good at it. She kicks down gates while being chased by Gobblers! She hits people with poles! It is awesome.
The special effects are really good. My other big worry, when I first heard this book was being made into a movie, was that some of essential and best things about it just wouldn’t work on screen, particularly the daemons and the talking bears. But no! The daemons look real and natural and believable. The bears are powerful and scary and wise, just like they should be. Iorek is the exiled king he should be- there’s a change to his backstory that pissed me off, but his voice and appearance are just great.
And now, the much longer list, the bad things: in general, the pacing felt rushed. Everything felt summarized to me. And part of that may have been that I’m familiar with the longer and wider world of the book (which I reread just a few months ago), but I think any viewer would sense that. There’s never enough time given to develop any setting or group of people into the rich, full dimensions they should have, so it all feels shallow. And, you know, it’s a 300 page book into a movie; I get that some things have to be cut. But I’d rather have them cut the gyptians entirely and get a really good look at Bolvangar than have a half-assed attempt at both. And on that note, The Golden Compass is falling into a very particular genre of movies: big fantasy epics that come out at December. Unlike many movies, this genre is allowed to be three hours or longer. The Golden Compass probably ran about an hour and 45 minutes. I think part of that might have been a cut at the end that seems to have been made pretty late in the post-production process (more in a few paragraphs), but dudes, really. You’ve got a book that is loved for its immensely detailed world-building. Give a little more time to flesh that out.
The secularization of the Magisterium actually didn’t bother me much, though undoubtedly this book is the easiest of the trilogy to make that change. Actually, my annoyance with that change is that they didn’t secularize it enough; there’s all sorts of reasons why a political or military authority might be invested in protecting children’s innocence. But having someone say “A long time ago one of our ancestors did something bad” is incoherent and ridiculous if you’re going to refuse to mention Garden of Eden/Original Sin theology. My big problem with the Magisterium in the movie is actually that they’re cartoon villains. In the book, the members of the Magisterium believe that they’re doing something good. They’re aware that they’re harming innocents, but they do think that there’s an end that justifies the means. In the movie, their motives are given only as “they want to control all worlds” and “no one must question our authority”. Those are not the motives of human beings; those are the motives of people who twirl their mustaches and tie girls to railroad tracks. The book’s Magisterium is compelling because of the righteousness and faith of its members; the movie’s Magisterium is just stupid. It particularly harms Mrs. Coulter’s character; her struggle between the Magisterium and Lord Asriel is fascinating in the book, particularly with her history as an adulteress (which is mentioned only extremely briefly in the movie, by the way), but in the movie there’s no reason for anyone to be part of the Magisterium other than Evil. That doesn’t make for interesting character development.
In general, that’s what’s wrong with the whole movie. Not that they secularized it, but that, you know, a dark and complex story couldn’t be marketed for kids. Interviews with some of the people involved have stated that there was market pressure to make a movie that was upbeat and had a happy ending, and I think that did more damage that the bloody Christian Right protests.
The daemons look awesome in the movie, but though we’re told it, the movie never manages to do what the book does: compelling convince us that these things are people’s souls. They’re cool pets, maybe good friends, but I could never feel that they’re an essential part of being human. In the book, by the time you see the people who have had the intercission, it’s horrifying. It’s like zombies, or people whose minds have been wiped. There isn’t that feeling in the movie, which means that the scene where Lyra almost has it happen to her doesn’t have any real power. It felt mostly like it would kinda suck to have your daemon cut away, but in the same sense that it would suck to have your best friend move to another state. There just wasn’t the terrifying and vaguely-sexual/rape overtones to the scene that it needs to have to show the horror of what the Magisterium is doing.
Another reason why I think this doesn’t work is that we don’t really see anyone who’s had the intercission. If the nurses and guards of Bolvanger have had it, like in the book, it’s not mentioned. We do see the little boy Lyra finds in a meat locker (switched from Tony to Billy Costa, but that’s not a change that bothered me) clutching a replacement, but it’s an extremely short scene and, more importantly, HE DOESN’T DIE. You know that entire memorably and heart-wrenching scene where he dies and they prepare to bury him, and Lyra finds they’ve thrown away the cod he was using as a replacement for his daemon, and carves a gold coin with his daemon’s name to bury with him, and if you are human you wept while reading it? ALL GONE! Entirely! She finds him, returns him to the gyptians who promise to get his daemon back, and then it’s never mentioned again.
Which brings me to my most important point. Everything bad about the movie I was willing to forgive and enjoy until we got to this. The entire ending has been cut. The movie ends before Lyra and Roger get to Lord Asriel. Supposedly it’s going to be at the beginning of the next movie (there’s an article in the New York Times about it), but I don’t care. This change utterly violates the entire spirit of the story. Lyra should get to Lord Asriel, who kills Roger, thus fulfilling the prophecy that she’ll betray someone and twisting everything that has gone before from the standard quest narrative into instead a story about innocent lost and a competition between two sides, neither of which can be trusted and each of which is willing to do awful things to achieve their goals. It should be a story about Lyra on her own, about how gaining knowledge throws you out of the place you grew up in. Now The Golden Compass has a fucking happy ending, it ends with Lyra and Roger and Iorek and Lee as a team together, coming straight from achieving victory over Bolvanger, flying into the pretty lights in the airship with swelling music. It is so fundamentally wrong to the spirit of the book, and thankfully people seem aware of that; at my screening, people howled at the screen when the credits came up. The Golden Compass is supposed to be a story about how there aren’t easy answers, and the toll (and joy) of experience, and now it’s not. Now it’s a story about how good always vanquishes evil and then everyone always lives happily ever after, and that’s so far off from the original that I don’t know how Pullman approved it.
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no subject
Date: 2007-12-02 09:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-02 09:39 pm (UTC)But, yep, happy ending complete with music swelling into cheesy song over the credits and the heroes doing the equivalent of riding into the sunset.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-02 09:21 pm (UTC)You write wonderfully, btw. ^^
no subject
Date: 2007-12-02 09:42 pm (UTC)It's a very, very pretty movie; the special effects and sets are gorgeous, and all the actors are awesome. So it's well worth seeing, in a way.
Thank you, hee. I suppose anger is inspirational.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-02 10:22 pm (UTC)Books aimed at boys tend to have some Serious Alone quest that makes the boy into A MAN; books aimed at girls tend to have her learn to work well with others and finding her place!
How much of that do you think was what was going on with this?
no subject
Date: 2007-12-02 11:21 pm (UTC)I feel like there's a real tendency in children's stories (and adult stories, really) lately to have the emphasis be on making a home or finding somewhere the character fits in, regardless of whether it's a story aimed at boys or girls. Stories that are about leaving a home and that experience are adult stories, always. Part of that, I think, is the perceived need for children's stories to have happy endings, which is much simpler with the first narrative. I wonder if some of the rest of it has to do with the current perception of the breakdown of the traditional family home and etc, and that many people no longer feel like they grew up somewhere safe and innocent (if they ever did, I guess), and so they seek that out instead of having to leave it.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 12:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 01:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 01:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 01:21 am (UTC)I also wonder at what point in the process the decision was made to move the ending to the next movie, because there's a shot in the preview that's not in the movie which looks like it might well be from the pivotal scene. If the cut was made fairly recently, that would probably effect Pullman's perception of things.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 01:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 01:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 04:35 am (UTC)I had been so looking forward to this movie. Honestly, I was going to actually take a day off work so I could make the fairly long journey to the nearest city so that I could watch it.
But every review, both fan and non-fan, that I've read has told me one thing: I don't want to see it, because I won't enjoy it. The very fact that the Tony/Billy scene has been so... tamed has completely removed my desire to see the damned thing. That scene was the one that completely tore my heart out when I read the first book, it was such a fantastically skilful piece of writing, and I was fully prepared to sit in the theatre, sobbing my heart out when the movie reached that point.
I should have known that Hollywood doesn't believe in taking a risk with a sad ending any more. The books are young adult books; and those that read them should be given the respect that young adults are due. The controversy and sadness of life should not be toned down, just in case it upsets them.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-07 11:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-06 07:10 pm (UTC)She kicks down gates while being chased by Gobblers!
Yes! That was so awesome. :D
I was actually a lot more disgruntled about the ending scene being shifted than is probably coming across, but I long ago resigned myself to the fact that the movie is never going to be as good as the books. It's probably why Pullman always figured he'd never find a large audience for the books: it's a story about a girl and boy who, though young, find themselves doing very un-childlike things and having to use resources which are normally considered Bad, like lying and playing people off each other, etc. Which I, and obviously a lot more people, think is completely awesome.
If it helps, we had stunned silence for a moment when the credits came up, before everything went nuts. Of all the bad places to end it, that was probably the worst.
I knew the Magisterium would be tossed on its head. If they wanted any kind of decent budget, they were going to have to do that. I imagine Pullman is quietly frustrated but used to having his views reacted to in that way.)
I remember reading a very long article and interview with the director (I can't remember from where, only that it took most of my lunch hour), and I got the distinct impression that he had a serious amount of people breathing down his neck throughout the entire process. I believe the decision to change the ending was done late in the process, but it's been said it'll be put in the beginning of the next one.
That said, if this one makes enough money (and hopefully it will), I remain hopeful that they'll be given free rein to run with the next film. Because any film that has a kid dying right at the beginning can only go in one direction, really. But if Will doesn't lose his fingers in the next book, I will be pissed. I imagine if they make changes like that in the next film, though, they will lose some of the books' fans, which will also be dangerous to the bottom line because they're (hopefully) the core audience they want. It's just always frustrating to have money be the bottom line, again and again.
I also want Asriel to have his moment in the next film, so they better damn make it. Asriel was woefully underused.
(Also, randomly, apparently Pullman said somewhere that the betrayal is not Lyra unwittingly leading Roger to Asriel, but is abandoning Pan when she enters the Realm of the Dead. Apparently.)
It'll be interesting to hear Pullman's thoughts on it, now, when the edited finished product is on display. Maybe they'll do an extended version on DVD if a lot was cut out? Because it really was way too short, even for a kid's movie (I think even Narnia was longer).
You know, now I think I want to base my second-chance thesis on HDM, which I was originally thinking of doing and got talked out of. There's no denying HDM is popular (duh), but it doesn't fit inro any of the genre cliches and stereotypes. There's an argument in there somewhere, and I could probably do something with contrasting it to Narnia as well, and it'll be easy to make my supervisor read the trilogy if he hasn't already.
Also, random thread hopping here, but:
I feel like there's a real tendency in children's stories (and adult stories, really) lately to have the emphasis be on making a home or finding somewhere the character fits in, regardless of whether it's a story aimed at boys or girls.
This is actually really interesting to me because in my own book, my character actually rejects her "real home" and being reunited with her family in the end, instead vouching to stay where she was and make it on her own. Huh.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-07 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-07 11:21 pm (UTC)That could be. He certainly doesn't look healthy, when we see him. I still would have liked for this to be an actual scene instead of something that happens off screen though, you know?
(Also, randomly, apparently Pullman said somewhere that the betrayal is not Lyra unwittingly leading Roger to Asriel, but is abandoning Pan when she enters the Realm of the Dead. Apparently.)
Huh. Well, I could see that, I guess. Still, I think what happens to Roger is really really important to the story, regardless of whether the prophecy gets fulfilled then or later. And either way, it's sort of pointless in the movie, since they don't talk about that part of the prophecy.
I would totally read a thesis about His Dark Materials! I would read one about vampires, too. But, still, awesome!
This is actually really interesting to me because in my own book, my character actually rejects her "real home" and being reunited with her family in the end, instead vouching to stay where she was and make it on her own. Huh.
Cool. I still would love to read this, once you have a draft you like.
I feel bad for this movie, because there's no way it was going to get made and be really faithful to the book, because they weren't going to get funding that way. On the other hand, it's going to suffer (in terms of people protesting it) no matter what they put in the movie, just because people know what's in the book. So they could have changed everything and some people would still get upset. And this way they've changed stuff enough to annoy some of the fans of the book, but not enough to make things better for the protesters. They sort of got stuck in a Catch 22. But it was really neat to be able to see the places and sets in the movie, and the actors were So Good.