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.
