The anti-Lord of the Rings

We saw The Golden Compass this weekend and I quite liked it. I have not read the book; my partner has and loved it (and the other two books in the series as well), and I think he was a bit disappointed in the movie as, with a running time of under two hours, it leaves out huge chunks of the book. I suspect that's one reason why I liked it: it was short, to the point, had good effects, built up an interesting fantasy world, and left you wanting more. While I appreciate what Peter Jackson did with his epic production of Lord of the Rings, each movie was far too long and I felt exhausted (and not in a glowing, happy way) after each film. There are battle scenes in Golden Compass which, if Jackson had made the movie, would have lasted a good half-hour or more; here, director Chris Weitz gets us through them in five or ten minutes, tops, and they are all more effective for their relative brevity.

A narrator spends the first moments of the movie setting up a fascinating parallel world, a sort of Victorian-era fantasyland with airships in the sky and lots of animals on the ground, which are actually people's "souls," externalized as accompanying animals called daemons. The main character, a young girl named Lyra, is trying to find out what's happened to the children who have been vanishing off the streets (think Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). She is helped on her quest by a grizzled adventurer with his own nifty airship (like Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon) and a magical bear (the effect is a little like Aslan in the Narnia movie), and hindered by a beautiful but wicked and powerful woman (yes, just like the Witch in Disney's Snow White). There's also an unexplained substance called "Dust" (The Force??) and an big battle between good and evil (Tolkien), and a resolution which was satisfying to me, but might not be to fans of the book.

All the fuss over the movie being anti-religious is ridiculous; the institution of the Magisterium, which in the book is apparently a stand-in for the Catholic Church, is, in the movie, much closer to being a stand-in for a Orwellian fascist government that thinks free will is bad. Of course, you can see where the connections once had been (the word "heresy" gets thrown about a bit), but nothing in this film, which strikes me as perfect family entertainment, will lead a child down the path of Questioning Religion. As with most fantasy epics, the acting is not the reason people go see the film; here, Dakota Blue Richards does a fine job as Lyra, Nicole Kidman is excellent as the wicked Mrs. Coulter, and Ian McKellan's voice gives the animated bear Iorek a real personality. Sam Elliott is a smidge too old as the cowboy; Daniel Craig, despite his special billing and ubiquitous presence in the movie posters, is only in the film for about 10 minutes, but he strikes many handsome, commanding poses in that time. The film may not do well enough to warrant a big-budget sequel, but I enjoyed it and would consider seeing it again.