The Golden Compass has a witch queen, an armored bear, a Texan in a hot air balloon, and a little girl who can read a machine that tells the truth. It has Nicole Kidman. It has Daniel Craig. It has a $180 million budget and the first book of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials behind it. It should not be this flat.
Chris Weitz wrote and directed the 2007 film, based on Pullman’s 1995 novel Northern Lights. It runs 113 minutes. It won Best Visual Effects at the 80th Academy Awards and Best Special Visual Effects at the 61st British Academy Film Awards. It grossed $372 million against that $180 million budget. And it never once makes you feel the cold.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
Lyra Belacqua and the Alethiometer
Dakota Blue Richards plays Lyra, an orphan raised at Jordan College, Oxford, with her dæmon Pantalaimon. New Line announced her casting in June 2006, when she was 11. It was her first acting role. She is the best thing in the film, and the film does not know it.
The mechanics are the problem. In this world, every person’s soul lives outside the body as an animal companion, a dæmon. Children’s dæmons shift form with their moods. At puberty they settle into one shape. The Magisterium, the church that rules under the Authority, forbids talk of Dust, the cosmic particles Lord Asriel finds at the North Pole. Asriel says Dust links to infinite worlds. If he is right, the Magisterium’s control falls apart.
That is a story about growing up, about the moment a soul picks a shape and stops moving. The film states it. It does not dramatize it.
Nicole Kidman and the Golden Monkey
Kidman plays Marisa Coulter, who takes Lyra to London and turns out to lead the Gobblers, the kidnappers taking children north. Her dæmon is a silent, aggressive golden monkey. Pullman wanted Kidman for the role ten years before production. She first turned it down because she did not want to play a villain, then signed after a personal letter from him.
She is good. The monkey is better. There is a scene where the monkey goes for the alethiometer, and the film briefly remembers it is a horror story about adults stealing children’s souls. Then it forgets again.
The rest of the cast is a list of people who deserved more scenes:
- Sam Elliott as Lee Scoresby, the Texan aeronaut. Pullman has said the film got Elliott “just right.”
- Eva Green as Serafina Pekkala, the witch queen who tells Lyra the children are at a Magisterial station.
- Ian McKellen as the voice of Iorek Byrnison, the armored bear.
- Jim Carter as John Faa, king of the Gyptians, and Tom Courtenay as Farder Coram, who teaches Lyra to read the alethiometer.
- Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel, Lyra’s uncle, who spends his scenes explaining the plot.
A Compass That Points Nowhere
Weitz was announced in February 2002. The project then stalled for years over the screenplay and the director’s chair, with Weitz leaving and returning. Richards was cast in June 2006, Kidman and Craig soon after. Shooting began that September at Shepperton Studios and ran for months, with location work in England, Switzerland and Norway.
You can feel every one of those years in the finished film. It is a movie assembled by people afraid of the book. The Gobblers become a rescue mission. The alethiometer, an artefact that reveals the truth, becomes a gadget that produces exposition on cue.
The tagline promises: “There are worlds beyond our own. The compass will show the way.” The compass shows the way to the next plot point. That is all.
What the film does have is production design. The bear fight lands. The dæmons are rendered with real care, and the visual effects awards followed. But effects are not a story.
What This Film Gets Wrong
The Golden Compass premiered in London on 27 November 2007, opened in the UK on 5 December through Entertainment Film and in the US on 7 December through New Line. It got mixed reviews. The 5.1 out of 10 is fair, and the reason is not ambition. The reason is fear.
Pullman’s novel carries weight the film will not pick up. Weitz’s film is about a girl who needs to find her friend. Those are not the same movie, and the second one is not worth 113 minutes.
Richards is the argument for a better version. She plays Lyra as stubborn and unimpressed, which is exactly right, and she holds the screen against Kidman without flinching. Craig and Green and Elliott are wasted, but they are not the failure. The failure is a script that keeps explaining a world instead of letting us live in it.
The Golden Compass is not a disaster. It is worse than that. It is competent, expensive and forgettable, and it had everything it needed to be neither.
5.1 of 10.
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