Flak Magazine: Review of The Golden Compass, 1-3-08

The adaptation of The Golden Compass is the pro tempore crowning achievement of director Chris Weitz's career. The film is a compelling, action-driven jaunt through a parallel universe most notable because everyone has a part of their soul manifested as an animal companion called a daemon, and where a mystical golden dust interacts with people in invisible and wonderful ways. From a source text as rich and as magnificent as Philip Pullman's novel, Weitz has produced a film every bit its equal, all the while deftly handling the elephant in the room: What do we do about the whole God thing?

Adaptations of existing works, especially in today's flooded market of young adult fantasy, are tough enough sells, and Pullman did the filmmakers no favors with the His Dark Materials trilogy. In his books, characters from all corners quest to get out from under the totalitarian rule of the church. Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) is the standard-bearer of this movement, using science to find The Truth and declaring war on religion (an inversion of the standard fantasy trope of mystic heroes warring technological foes ).

His Dark Materials does not come off as devoutly atheist, no matter what you heard about Pullman; the books simply challenge the concept of a postponed reward in heaven, and counterpoint this with their characters' effort to assemble a heaven on earth. It may be Godless, technically speaking, but it reinforces a need for lowercase-G godliness and grace in people's ways. Pullman's masterwork should be called no worse than "interesting" by religious readers. Its main characters essentially play out the Beatitudes from page to page.

Weitz's strategy on how to handle the God issue was stunning, yet confusing to initial reviewers. The Golden Compass was not produced with a Lord of the Rings-style three-picture deal in hand; New Line chose to assess the trilogy's viability once box office returns were in. As such, Weitz needed to assemble a film that will draw in viewers (read: no God-hating) but leaves room for future volumes. Make no mistake: The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, the balance of Pullman's trilogy, can't exist without explicitly addressing God. God is a character, God has an army, God is the reason for the season. A strictly Godless first film wouldn't play. But an anti-God version won't please the studio, either.

The impossibly good solution Weitz came up with boils down to wordplay. The film's characters questions the authoritarian Magisterium, clearly a theological party but never identified as such, and their words are infused with double meaning that most viewers will never pick up on. A line like "After this, no one will question our authority!" seems a bland but appropriate boast from a group of scary men in robes, but that line will mean something wholly different should the rest of the trilogy get greenlit, because in Pullman, the name for God is The Authority — meaning all the private Magisterium conversations can have been about propping up God. This adaptability is sly and masterful, and sure befuddled the critics. Did Weitz cut out all the religion stuff and make a neutral movie? Is this still an anti-church crusade? Weitz has it both ways.

The other smart part of Weitz's strategy was to cut the film well short of Pullman's breathtaking ending. As if adapting borderline atheistic material was hard enough, Weitz faced a major narrative challenge: To end the film after the main action around prophesied child savior Lyra Belacqua, making the movie about a rescue mission, or at the book's unspeakably good cliffhanger about Lyra, Asriel and Pullman's Dust, the mysterious substance whose spiritual import that would have therefore brought the focus back around to faith and religion. Though Pullman's ending provides gasp-worthy drama, stopping the movie as Weitz did is consistent with his strategy — the movie would have been about religion had we gone five minutes farther, but as is, it could have been about religion.

Even though faith gets fuzzed up in the film, the presence of Dust gives a sense that this world is just as rich and as deep as Tolkien, Rowling, and C.S. Lewis. Little is resolved about Dust — its source, its purpose, its consequence — but even in the abridged world of the movie, it fascinates. Is it original sin? Is it lifeblood? Should we embrace it or fight it? Weitz pulls it off perfectly, much as he does most of the Pullman world. The only thing really lacking is development of the relationship between a human and their daemon (who, incidentally, appear to be made up of Dust). This animal companion is literally a manifestation of part of the soul. Should the human die, the daemon goes up in a puff of dust. (This is demonstrated on multiple occasions by the claws of polar bear Iorek Byrnison. Fight scenes around him look like the Fourth of July.) Should the daemon die, the human lives a half-life. As pet owners can attest, this connection tugs directly on the heartstrings, and given how unique this narrative contraption is, it's too bad that Weitz treats daemons primarily as a sort of buddy.

Aside from condemnations from uninformed religious pundits, the only real barrier The Golden Compass faces is a crowded marketplace. Harry, Frodo and others have been here recently, whether here is Narnia, Terabithia or another fantasy playground. Opening weekend showings of The Golden Compass were preceded by trailers for Narnia sequel Prince Caspian and Inkheart, both squarely in the genre. (Don't think that Pullman, a devout Lewis-hater, didn't howl at the Narnia connection.) How close are we to the saturation point? How many more times can we hear, "I'm supposed to save the world? I can't even talk to a girl!"

With any hope, through this static, viewers will see The Golden Compass as what it is: a far deeper, far richer work than most of the movies chasing Lord of the Rings dollars. In our perfect world, where people don't have daemons but do have Barnes & Noble, the universe Pullman and Weitz have created will send viewers straight from the cinema to the bookstore to track Lyra further, and to take on these questions of the role of religion. In Pullman's His Dark Materials, there is simply too much thought, too many questions and too much quality to ignore.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)