The Golden Compass
Directed by Chris Weitz
After criticizing the deficiencies of recent fantasy movies like Stardust and Beowulf, along comes The Golden Compass, a far less imaginative fable, but with a preening budget, bigger promotion and even more celebrity-stars. American Pie’s writer-director Chris Weitz doesn’t disguise this formula; he has adapted Philip Pullman’s children’s book Northern Lights to embrace it—helping the industry further infantilize film culture.
Weitz’s heroine, Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards), a red-haired English orphan, stands in for the audience weaned on big-screen videogames with shallow adventures and baroque cosmologies. Lyra’s kid-centric exploits are frustratingly convoluted. To wit: One of the many oddball creatures who fights to protect Lyra and her mystical compass-maguffin from The Magisterium, the power-mad government, sizes up the chaos and asks, “What is the war about?” That’s when gorgeous Eva Green as the warrior-witch Serafina Pekkala, portentously—but to me, hilariously—declares, “Nothing less than free will!”
Fact is, The Golden Compass gives film-goers no imaginative choices. There’s no clear history or geography beyond bedtime-story gobbledy-gook; no exploration of belief systems or graspable politics other than a jumble of simplistically moralistic fables. Humans are accompanied by animal-spirits called “daemons,” while ships and “aeroplanes” traverse far-flung climates. It’s all derived from the hectic mindlessness Peter Jackson instituted with his deracinated adaptations of Tolkien in those infernal Lord of the Rings movies. Jackson’s blockbuster has become the substitute mythology of modern movies—a paradigm of allegories CGI effects that gets robotically replicated in movies from Sky Captain and the City of Tomorrow to Pirates of the Caribbean to all the Harry Potters and The Chronicles of Narnia. In The Golden Compass, the fabrication of different quasi-British worlds, intrepid children, talking animals, coveted treasures and mysterious forces of life and death is yawningly familiar yet short of specific cultural interest.
Lyra’s exodus from her school-centered home to search for her globetrotting uncle Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) is hindered by the suspicious Marisa Coulter (Nicole Kidman). The quest is full of Oedipal allusions: Lyra’s promise to rescue childhood friend Roger (Ben Walker), and dozens of youths kidnapped by the Magisterium that wants to zap their souls, is dimly reminiscent of countless heritage and identity fables from Pinocchio and Oliver Twist to Star Wars. But here fascination is replaced with absurd, vaguely evocative names and terms: Pantalaimon, Farder Coram, Lee Scoresby, Anbaric energy, Gobblers, Gyptians, Intercision, Photograms, Alethiometer, Panserbjornes. It’s enough to make Shrek’s puerile parodies seem inspired.
While updated legends such as Stardust and Zemeckis’ Beowulf were annoyingly reductive and turned narrative into a hodgepodge of incidents, they occasionally boasted genuine spectacle, referred to cultural history and gestured toward the psychic compulsions of human behavior. Robert De Niro’s closeted pirate, Captain Shakespeare, in Stardust lifted the fantasy genre out of childishness while Ray Winstone’s self-mythologizing, sexually weak Beowulf complemented De Niro’s example of human foible. That’s what happens when filmmakers humanize the Peter Jackson formula. Chris Weitz doesn’t get that Jackson set a low standard for fantasy-adventure movies. His ferret-monkey-bird daemons are cutesy devolutions of the kittens and doves D.W. Griffith originated as subtle personifications of his character’s spirits.
Carl Jung would throw up his hands at Chris Weitz’s non-archetypes in The Golden Compass. These exotic figures mean
nothing, even with good actors like Tom Courtenay playing the wise Gyptian, Farder Coram or Sam Elliott as the American aviator-cowboy, Lee Scoresby. They speak their motivations (“We have to conquer our fear”) rather than demonstrate them. Making these characters over-explicit for children means they’re cartoonish to adults. The climactic polar bear fight (with dreadful Ian McKellen bellowing the voice of the bear Iorek Byrnison) doesn’t shift into great symbolism; it’s just two damn bears F/X colliding. And the Peter Jackson-bred audience applauds like performing seals.
Weitz shows no talent for visualizing the subconscious or giving tone to new philosophies. (He forsakes his own interest in adolescent perplexity that was apparent in American Pie and the nearly fine post-yuppie comedy, In Good Company.) The Golden Compass merely illustrates the philosophy of technology, looking as synthetically “visionary” as George Lucas’ The Attack of the Clones. Lyra speeding across a tundra on the back of a polar bear has no thrill to match E.T. flying across the moon and, without such wonderment, The Golden Compass cannot achieve any spiritual power. And Weitz’s actors are inspired. He gets nothing from Daniel Craig and Kidman as mythic parent figures, and Kidman is so poorly costumed and photographed she looks like a skinny frump. Young Richards and Walker as Lyra and Roger look like teenage versions of Kate Bush and Sid Vicious, yet they never fulfill the genetic suggestion that they are modern heirs of Brontė and Dickens.
Theologically confused and culturally contrived, The Golden Compass is devoid of charm and mystery. Its “beauty” is
artificial and superficial—proof that Peter Jackson’s influence over the fantasy-adventure film has ruined it.
Directed by Chris Weitz
After criticizing the deficiencies of recent fantasy movies like Stardust and Beowulf, along comes The Golden Compass, a far less imaginative fable, but with a preening budget, bigger promotion and even more celebrity-stars. American Pie’s writer-director Chris Weitz doesn’t disguise this formula; he has adapted Philip Pullman’s children’s book Northern Lights to embrace it—helping the industry further infantilize film culture.
Weitz’s heroine, Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards), a red-haired English orphan, stands in for the audience weaned on big-screen videogames with shallow adventures and baroque cosmologies. Lyra’s kid-centric exploits are frustratingly convoluted. To wit: One of the many oddball creatures who fights to protect Lyra and her mystical compass-maguffin from The Magisterium, the power-mad government, sizes up the chaos and asks, “What is the war about?” That’s when gorgeous Eva Green as the warrior-witch Serafina Pekkala, portentously—but to me, hilariously—declares, “Nothing less than free will!”
Fact is, The Golden Compass gives film-goers no imaginative choices. There’s no clear history or geography beyond bedtime-story gobbledy-gook; no exploration of belief systems or graspable politics other than a jumble of simplistically moralistic fables. Humans are accompanied by animal-spirits called “daemons,” while ships and “aeroplanes” traverse far-flung climates. It’s all derived from the hectic mindlessness Peter Jackson instituted with his deracinated adaptations of Tolkien in those infernal Lord of the Rings movies. Jackson’s blockbuster has become the substitute mythology of modern movies—a paradigm of allegories CGI effects that gets robotically replicated in movies from Sky Captain and the City of Tomorrow to Pirates of the Caribbean to all the Harry Potters and The Chronicles of Narnia. In The Golden Compass, the fabrication of different quasi-British worlds, intrepid children, talking animals, coveted treasures and mysterious forces of life and death is yawningly familiar yet short of specific cultural interest.
Lyra’s exodus from her school-centered home to search for her globetrotting uncle Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) is hindered by the suspicious Marisa Coulter (Nicole Kidman). The quest is full of Oedipal allusions: Lyra’s promise to rescue childhood friend Roger (Ben Walker), and dozens of youths kidnapped by the Magisterium that wants to zap their souls, is dimly reminiscent of countless heritage and identity fables from Pinocchio and Oliver Twist to Star Wars. But here fascination is replaced with absurd, vaguely evocative names and terms: Pantalaimon, Farder Coram, Lee Scoresby, Anbaric energy, Gobblers, Gyptians, Intercision, Photograms, Alethiometer, Panserbjornes. It’s enough to make Shrek’s puerile parodies seem inspired.
While updated legends such as Stardust and Zemeckis’ Beowulf were annoyingly reductive and turned narrative into a hodgepodge of incidents, they occasionally boasted genuine spectacle, referred to cultural history and gestured toward the psychic compulsions of human behavior. Robert De Niro’s closeted pirate, Captain Shakespeare, in Stardust lifted the fantasy genre out of childishness while Ray Winstone’s self-mythologizing, sexually weak Beowulf complemented De Niro’s example of human foible. That’s what happens when filmmakers humanize the Peter Jackson formula. Chris Weitz doesn’t get that Jackson set a low standard for fantasy-adventure movies. His ferret-monkey-bird daemons are cutesy devolutions of the kittens and doves D.W. Griffith originated as subtle personifications of his character’s spirits.
Carl Jung would throw up his hands at Chris Weitz’s non-archetypes in The Golden Compass. These exotic figures mean
nothing, even with good actors like Tom Courtenay playing the wise Gyptian, Farder Coram or Sam Elliott as the American aviator-cowboy, Lee Scoresby. They speak their motivations (“We have to conquer our fear”) rather than demonstrate them. Making these characters over-explicit for children means they’re cartoonish to adults. The climactic polar bear fight (with dreadful Ian McKellen bellowing the voice of the bear Iorek Byrnison) doesn’t shift into great symbolism; it’s just two damn bears F/X colliding. And the Peter Jackson-bred audience applauds like performing seals.
Weitz shows no talent for visualizing the subconscious or giving tone to new philosophies. (He forsakes his own interest in adolescent perplexity that was apparent in American Pie and the nearly fine post-yuppie comedy, In Good Company.) The Golden Compass merely illustrates the philosophy of technology, looking as synthetically “visionary” as George Lucas’ The Attack of the Clones. Lyra speeding across a tundra on the back of a polar bear has no thrill to match E.T. flying across the moon and, without such wonderment, The Golden Compass cannot achieve any spiritual power. And Weitz’s actors are inspired. He gets nothing from Daniel Craig and Kidman as mythic parent figures, and Kidman is so poorly costumed and photographed she looks like a skinny frump. Young Richards and Walker as Lyra and Roger look like teenage versions of Kate Bush and Sid Vicious, yet they never fulfill the genetic suggestion that they are modern heirs of Brontė and Dickens.
Theologically confused and culturally contrived, The Golden Compass is devoid of charm and mystery. Its “beauty” is
artificial and superficial—proof that Peter Jackson’s influence over the fantasy-adventure film has ruined it.
