On Friday after a very busy week (the last teaching week of the semester), I decided to go to a 21+ screening at the Arclight. This splendid event is held in a special part of the Arclight complex which means that you can buy a cocktail (gin and tonic in my case, made with Tanqueray No. Ten) and wander into the movie theatre with it and relax in a comfy chair and watch a movie for two hours.
Hmm… Sounds good. Was good. Why don’t I do this every Friday?
What I saw was about multiple universes and particle physics. Oh, and fighting polar bears.
Yes, it was opening night of the movie “The Golden Compass”, an adaptation of the book “Northern Lights”, or “The Golden Compass” as it was called in America, evidently on the decision of an editor who went to the same editor school as the one who decided that Americans can’t deal with “Philosopher’s Stone” and so changed it to “Sorcerer’s Stone”.
I was excited by the possibility of this film. I was excited by the fact that Phillip Pullman’s book is full of ideas and depth, and very well executed, and now people will get a taste of this excellent work. The book was a real breath of fresh air in the children+adults’ book genre, and it has been sad to see it so thoroughly overshadowed by the Potter material, which (while admittedly fun in parts) fall short on things like true innovation and depth, instead recycling a lot of very well tried and tested material (not that there’s anything wrong with that). (As before, I speak of the early books, I don’t know about the later ones – people tell me they got better in that regard)
Sadly, the film of the Golden Compass was a mess (in my opinion). But it was an odd mess. All the elements were there, but somehow they were not put together properly. It was the most clunkily directed film in this genre that I’ve seen since…. Chris Columbus’ awful work on the first two Harry Potter movies. I kept rooting for it, wanting it to get better, but it kept resisting. One of the biggest problems seemed to be that the film-makers were in a rush – as though they’d some directive to not stop and linger and enjoy the scenery, or that there are interesting thoughts and issues to consider, awkward situations to ponder, and so forth… There was too much of a rush to move along, and so the film seemed like a trailer for the actual film!
I was rooting for it because it would have been a rare successful mainstream film where instead of the battle with the adversary being about the usual well-worn types where it is never clear why the bad people want to take over all the lands and make it dark, or cold, or sad, or some other perfectly neutral aspect of nature rendered evil by the film’s (and sometimes the book’s) plot, and where the good people are then vaguely defined in terms of their opposition to the bad, it is about the much clearer (and much more frightening – and adult) battle: dogma and control on the one hand, and reason and curiosity on the other. The book is also about themes that are shared with other books in the genre such as innocence, growing up, and so forth, but there’s a refreshing approach to that in it too. It would have been excellent to see that make it to the film coherently too.
People who celebrate reason and curiosity as the core to so much of life (scientists, yes, but certainly not just us) should be excited about these books, and they should have been excited about the movie, but sadly (although there are lovely glimpses here and there) it’s mostly all lost. Same for most of the other key themes. The film-makers instead decided to try to bring out all the things that were in fact not essential to the core of the book, and so focussed way too much on all the clichés of the genre. So, yes, you can look forward to well-dressed tall shiny people with piercing eyes and the crisper English accents being obviously bad, and the shabbily dressed, unshaven people with charming West-Country rustic accents (“well my chile, you’d betterrr be coming with us then”) of course being painted as obviously good (same for Lyra’s on-again off-again cockney-esque accent, of course), and so forth.
There’s a bit of promise at the beginning. It starts out early on with what (once you strip away the fantasy elements loosely draped on it) can only be described as a seminar on extra dimensions and particle physics (“dust”), and a pitch by a scientist to his funding agency (the board at a fictional Oxford College) to give him funds to do more research. The bad people don’t want him doing research in this area. Roll the rest of the film reveling in this… But somehow this promising start is deserted by the poor film making and you lose sight of it all. We rush headlong off to dip into scenes here and there without lingering properly in any of them (never was there any sense of menace, and hardly any feeling of peril – they’d given you no reason to care (the obligatory appearance of Christopher Lee is not really enough to do that…)), and before you know it, we’re at the fighting polar bears and what ended up looking like a very poor cousin of the Battle of the Five Armies.
There are wonderful elements that are worth going to see. These include some excellent performances (Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra is excellent), the wonderfully realized Pullman version of Oxford that we never get to fully enjoy before it is yanked away from us, the excellently realized daemons that all the characters have – Lyra’s is just great, the polar bears (everybody loves polar bears!), and the wonderful wonderful old-meets-new technology. So go and see those, but the film as a whole is a shapeless, linear, mess that hides most of Pullman’s wonderful ideas. I think that the problem was that they needed an experienced director who really thoroughly understood the books, and what Pullman was trying to do. Maybe they should have tried harder to find one, or maybe even waited 25 – 30 years and let the directing be done by the generation who really enjoyed the books while young.
Summary: This was a chance for something truly fresh and original to make it to the screen. It’s all there in the books. The chance was squandered. I’m not asking for the “film of the book” -that’s just naive- but could they not even manage a glimmer of the freshness and originality that Phillip Pullman supplied as source material?
– Disappointing (but pretty to look at).
-cvj
(* a few shots of Christopher Lee is not enough, people!)
Hello golden compass I want a picure of the ice bears
From Tanisha
I think the named was changed for the American version because “The Golden Compass” fits in better with “The Suble Knife” and “The Amber Spyglass” for the other two books in the trilogy … “Northern Lights” just doesn’t fit.
Yvette: I often have to pretend that film-adaptations-of-well-loved-books are actually entirely different works.
–IP
When I was 11 years old The Golden Compass was my favorite book in the entire world- even had an autographed copy thanks to a kind English teacher! Looking back on it though it wasn’t as much the fantasy I loved (though it ranked up there) but rather the crash course in modern physics concepts and the thoughts of “what might be” as a result, particularly later on in the series. I often tell people that I love physics because I get excited about it the same way I used to get excited about fairy tales when I was very little, and I think TGC was really the transition where it all started. The fact that all the heroes were physicists and Lyra says in the second book that she wants to do physics when she grows up probably didn’t hurt either. 😉
I have yet to see this movie partly because it’s finals time right now and partly because I promised to see this movie with my sister during winter break. (Sis loved the books and is also a scientist, of course. Move along folks, nothing to see here…) I’m almost hesitant to see it because I know it will never compare to the visions I had and still entertain, but that stance never seems to work out so I’ll just go and pretend it’s some other story if it’s getting too annoying to watch.
>Should I still go see the film?
That’s up to you. I mentioned several things that did work well visually, and I ended: “Disappointing (but pretty to look at)”. It will be nice to see some of the visual renderings, but don’t go expecting that (m)any of Pullman’s ideas show up at all. The emphasis is really to make it a film that has the same movie-esque beats and appeal as the TLOR and HP movies… entirely missing the point. So more of the same and less of the different.
-cvj
I loved the “Dark Materials” books (even though, in my opinion, the ending to the trilogy didn’t seem to quite hold up to the philosophical/theological overhaul that the books seemed to be setting). Should I still go see the film?
–IP
Thanks for the links, Jude.
-cvj
As a school librarian, I’ve been in the thick of posts about the film and the book, even before the film came out. People on Rutger’s child lit list have been freaked out about the screenplay. Pullman is a member of that list, although he doesn’t post frequently, but his perspective on the furor has been interesting. I probably won’t see the film in theaters–hey John Cusack is in *two* movies in current release and I can only see so many movies–but in general the child lit folks seem to like it. (I’m glad to have your perspective–after all, you turned me on to the Bourne movies, which will arrive next week–all 3 of them). What interests me more is the censorship campaign against the books, brought about because the movie was made. I freaked out when an aide in my district indicated that Philip Pullman was conspiring to “destroy God in the hearts of children.” I like what Scott Westerfeld, one of my favorite young adult authors, says about the censorship effort in the US–
http://scottwesterfeld.com/blog/?p=352 and also the Christian Science Monitor article on the topic. http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1207/p09s02-coop.html It’s really all about the books for me.
It will be interesting to see what the sales of the books look like over the next few weeks. Yes the film has flaws, but it was probably good enough to make lots of children want to read the books for themselves.