The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

The Golden MacGuffin—er, I mean, “Compass”

December 8th, 2007

(There are spoilers below, if you care. If you haven’t read the book, though, they might help you make sense of the movie–or at least to understand how senseless it is.) 

I saw The Golden Compass at a sneak preview a week ago, and it’s taken me this long to write my reflections on it—not only because of being busy, but also because, well, it just wasn’t that good. It’s not terrible, either: it’s just there, leaving little lasting impression, in spite of its grandiose music and fancy CGI.

Philip Pullman’s novel—the first of the His Dark Materials trilogy—struck me as imaginative and powerful when I first read it, way back in 2000, right before the third volume, The Amber Spyglass, was released. Yes, you could tell that Pullman was probably “of the devil’s party” and knew it, but at least he wrote a compelling story. By The Amber Spyglass, however, careful storytelling disappeared in favor of sermonizing—anti-God sermonizing, that is. I won’t go into all that, though; my point is that The Golden Compass is well written, if troubling.

The movie is just troubling, and not really for its vaguely anti-Church stance. What’s ultimately troubling is that it’s not really for anything. We don’t really get enough insight into characters to understand what motivates them. Lyra (whose skill at lying is oh-so-subtly suggested by her name) tells tall tales to get out of scrapes, and yet she is the only character who—for some reason—can read the “alethiometer,” the titular compass (“aletheia” is “truth” in Greek). As I recall, this makes some shred of sense in the book, but not in the movie: Lyra can read the compass because she’s destined to do so. Period. There’s no real significance to the alethiometer, except to propel the plot along, to give Lyra an external reason for journeying here, there, and everywhere. Very quickly.

There’s one scene where Lyra, along with the Texan aeronaut Lee Scoresby and a troop of Gyptians (Gypsies) are trekking through snow, on their way to free children from the grim fortress of Bolvangar. The script has Lee say a line about how they need to be careful with the aeroship parts that, for some reason, they are carrying with them—which just makes you wonder, “Why aren’t they flying right now in the first place?” It’s one of the most pointless scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Speaking of pointless, Lyra’s “uncle,” the explorer Lord Asriel, is reduced here to a puzzling cipher. In Hebrew, the name “Asriel” or “Asrael” refers to the Angel of Death, though it’s also associated with a demonic being … and with Gargamel’s cat on The Smurfs. So you’d think, Smurfs aside, that this is supposed to be a pretty important person (and, in fact, in the books, he leads the war against the Kingdom of Heaven). In the movie, however, Asriel’s character mostly disappears after he heads north and gets captured. We learn from Mrs. Coulter (and how does she know?) that he has been perfecting his research on other worlds while in captivity (and why do we need to know this, since he never actually does anything with it before the movie ends?).

In the book, Lord Asriel succeeds in his research before the end of the book, managing to break through to another world—by killing Lyra’s friend, the little boy Roger. Clearly this is not an unambiguously heroic rebel, even by Pullman’s standards. Instead of confronting the fact that both Lyra’s parents are rather wretched people, the movie ends with Lyra escaping her mother, eagerly sailing off in an airship to find the man she now knows is her father. Everything will be all right, she tells herself. We’ll find a way to have a sequel—oh, sorry. That’s the studio talking. At this point, Lyra actually consults the compass, which tells her that she is bringing her father “exactly what he needs.” Viewers who have read the book gasp at the irony here—what he “needs” is her little friend as a sacrificial victim—but those new to the story will be left with a false optimism very much out of tone with the rest of the movie.

And the rest of the movie is dark indeed. And violent. My fellow moviegoers gasped aloud at the violent conclusion to the battle between two Armored Bears, in which the lower half of a bear’s jaw goes flying across the screen. That was bad enough, but I was even more troubled by the scene in which Lyra visits a shed containing the skins of animals who were once children’s daemons (external embodiments of their souls, in animal form). One of Lyra’s former acquaintances, the child Billy, sits on the floor of the shed, caressing the skin of the creature that used to be his daemon, Ratter. It made me feel physically sick. This scene should be disturbing—we should be outraged that the Magisterium is severing the connection between children and their souls—but something felt wrong. It wasn’t until a few days later that I put my finger on it. Because of the way daemons have been portrayed throughout the movie, as little more than cute animal sidekicks, this scene is more like the murdering of a child’s pet than of his soul. It’s still horrifying, but it’s a different kind of horror. The book emphasizes how everyone backs away from a child without his daemon because it’s “unnatural.” In other words, the horror in the book relies less on sentiment. The movie treats daemons very sentimentally.

This is why the utter lack of sentiment for daemons in the climactic battle scene is so troubling to me. The movie, lacking Asriel’s breaking into another world as its climax, builds up a battle between the escaped children, the Gyptians, the witches, and an Armored Bear on one side—and some random people (I forget what they’re called) on the other. They’re just mercenaries hired by the Magisterium to guard Bolvangar, so no one here is fighting the real adversary. And yet the musical swells, the screen lights up with showers of golden dust (actually, Dust), which—oh, wait—is only there because the soldiers’ daemons (along with the soldiers themselves) are dying. Apparently this is beautiful and not horrifying, but there’s no hint as to why. (Pullman’s sermon on why it’s glorious to dissolve into happy little Dust particles, rather than, say, rising again and living with your soul’s Creator and Source for all eternity, doesn’t occur until the end of The Amber Spyglass.)

So, that’s about it. I can’t see how the franchise—if it continues—can improve from here, given the lesser quality of the next two books. The relative success of The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter movies, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe seems to have rushed a lot of lackluster fantasy films into production (most notably, The Dark Is Rising, which looks so bad that I refuse to see it). Here’s hoping the writer’s strike will give everyone a chance to regroup before someone decides to tackle Jonathan Stroud’s fabulous Bartimaeus Trilogy.

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