[rating:2.5]
Director: Chris Weitz
Starring: Dakota Blue Richards, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig
If you want the capsule review of The Golden Compass, everything you need to know is in the poster. It looks pretty, with lots of clean stuff. There’s a handsome man and an icy, beautiful woman, and a floaty chick and a balloon and an armored polar bear with what may be a little girl riding its back.
All four principal figures and their respective backgrounds are obviously individual posters meant to convey a different aspect or “feel,” and on a moment’s reflection, it’s clear that they don’t work together, and that they don’t tell any kind of actual story, which is saying a lot considering how much crap they’ve thrown onto that oversized rectangle. And other than being the backdrop of the title design, there’s no actual golden compass apparent. If you’d seen the movie, you’d know that it’s entirely about the tiny girl on the back of the polar bear, who’s so small you can’t even see her. You’d know that the guy at top left is barely in the film at all, and is really an entirely unnecessary character—his contributions to the advancement of the plot could’ve been handled in any of a dozen other ways. You’d also know that there’s parallel universes, a rather clerical-feeling dictatorship, flying witches, lots of blue-eyed gypsies, and one very lost cowboy. But just going off what we do know from the poster: It’s a hodge-podge of arguably pretty things and familiar fantasy elements (not the saddled polar bear. That seems kinda new) that lacks focus and doesn’t add up to anything.
Really, that’s all you need to know about the film. It’s adapted from some book by a different name, and it starts with narration about how there are all these parallel worlds different from ours, but not very, only sometimes people’s “souls” are not in their bodies, but in the taking animals who hang around them all the time, providing someone to address expository dialogue to. Oh, and there’s “dust,” of some magic kind, and it’s very special and it has to do with how the multiverse works and, no, we’re not ever going to explain any more than that. We’re just gonna end the movie on an unsatisfying cliffhanger that will attempt to convince us it’s satisfying because the little girl who is our heroine (she’s the little blob on the back of the polar bear, you know) will make tremendously earnest speeches about how she’s going to Get to the Bottom of Things and Right Great Wrongs and Make a Difference, and the music will rise, and there will be a sunset to navigate toward, and there we go, an unfulfilling chapter in some kind of hoped-for fantasy franchise.
A game cast tackles pretty much every role on the fantasy scorecard except unicorn. The little girl who plays the heroine, Dakota Blue Richards, is the best thing in the movie.
She’s a lot of fun to watch, but in the absence of character development, plot cohesion or narrative thrust, is doomed in her attempt to carry the film herself. Nicole Kidman is playing a variation of the role she specializes in when she’s not in blatant pursuit of an Oscar: Glamorous, icy Barbie Doll—a big fake. She used that persona brilliantly in To Die For, to an extreme in the Stepford Wives remake, and here to less effect than one might’ve hoped. Daniel Craig is in the film for 10 minutes, mostly to give the heroine someone to be reunited with, presumably, in the next film. (Trivia: His Casino Royale costar, Eva Green, is also in the film. They get no scenes together here, but none-too-subtle implications suggest they’ll be linked in future chapters.)
Writer-director Chris Weitz (About a Boy, the American Pie comedies) seems to really know how to direct a film, in terms of delivering action and visual interest and all that technical stuff. In terms of telling a story, he’s a flop. There’s enough story here for six fantasy movies, and he can’t get one complete flick out of it. Stuff happens, but without character development, it’s hard to keep up and harder to care. Ending on a cliffhanger in which the main character gleefully lists all the unanswered plot points before the curtain falls just makes things worse. People leaving my screening seemed bewildered and unsatisfied—but it must be noted, they didn’t seem too upset about it, perhaps because the film is glossy and fast-moving and competent in every way except, you know, the one that counts most.
Tags: daniel craig, fantasy, nicole kidman
“People leaving my screening seemed bewildered and unsatisfied—but it must be noted, they didn’t seem too upset about it, perhaps because the film is glossy and fast-moving and competent in every way except, you know, the one that counts most.”
That’s because Americans like brightly-colored, sparkly, shiny things. Now that we have CGI, there’s no need to hire expensive stunt actors or have a plot.
See, the thing is that it’s made from a book that is the beginning of a trilogy, hence the massive cliffhanger ending. If one has read the series, or has even heard of it, they would maybe expect the cliffhanger and be less perturbed and disappointed by it.
That said, I heard it was disappointing even if you have read the books; those are some of my favorite books ever (yes, I’m young – 21), but I was unable to see the movie in theatres.
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