Adapting Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is a delicate task. It isn't just that Pullman's fantasy epic is an explicit indictment of the Catholic Church and religious institutions in general. It's that the stories themselves are deep meditations on coming of age and otherness that rely on the patient development of characters over significant periods of time. The first entry, The Golden Compass, is the most straightforward adventure and seemingly the easiest to translate to the screen, but its strengths still come from a quieter place. Writer/director Chris Weitz's last effort, an adaptation of Nick Hornby's About a Boy, demonstrated his capacity to fit a complex character-driven story into an entertaining two-hour package. Unfortunately, he's failed to do the same for The Golden Compass .
For the uninitiated, Compass is the story of young Lyra Belacqua and her adventures in an alternate-universe Britain, where human souls walk independent of their bodies, in the form of animals that reflect their personality. Their animal or "daemon" can change shape when young, but becomes fixed around the time of puberty. Lyra is an orphan, placed in the care of scholars at Oxford College by her adventurer uncle Lord Asriel. When Asriel visits the college, Lyra's journey begins. Soon she obtains the titular compass, a device that allows its reader to learn the truth about anything through intuitive semiotics.
Compass is impressively short for a modern fantasy epic, less than two hours, but it suffers for it. The audience is bombarded with information from the outset, pulled from one plot point and setting to the next so quickly that there's barely enough time to digest what's just happened, let alone get an accurate sense of who the characters are. It's a shame, because the movie is full of solid performances — the unknown Dakota Blue Richards' Lyra in particular. Also notable is Nicole Kidman as chief antagonist Mrs. Coulter, who is as cold and manipulative as the character demands but affects moments of vulnerability that keep her human.
Special effects abound in Compass, and in general they're good. But — strange to say given the excess of your average big-budget fantasy — New Line could have stood to put a bit more money behind the production. The abundant CGI is excellent when animating the characters' daemons and the race of armored bears that populate the movie, but the more fantastic vistas are cartoonish and flat. It never seems like these characters inhabit a real place. That's the unfortunate fact of the movie as a whole: it fails to convincingly establish its world or the people that inhabit it. Before Weitz adapts book two, The Subtle Knife, here's hoping he learns some subtlety. — John Constantine
