Pullman dislikes Tolkien because he creates a hermetically sealed fantasy world with its own maps and charts and rules. Pullman intends his own fantasy world to echo ours, in character and themes. It has to feel familiar and unfamiliar. It has to be both family drama and epic fantasy.
Not the Big Idea but the little ideas. The role the witches play, and the particulars of their relations to humans. The marginalization of the gyptians. The groups are all flattened into a grubby band of misfit heroes led by one special little girl.
But it also tries too hard to protect her and keep her safe. The death of her second friend comes at the end of the book. The shooting script omitted the Biblical references but still kept the meat of the scene.
She is, as always, stubborn and resentful. When she presses him on the concept of Dust, he explains the purpose of his illegal experiments—not in the condescending way Mrs. Coulter does, but in the real way the audience needs to hear. He means to discover the source of Dust and free mankind from original sin. In the book and the shooting script, Lyra is crushed to discover she has just delivered Roger to his death.
She vows to avenge him, which drives the plot in the rest of the books. In the movie, the ending unfolds differently. One can only imagine what led to this drastic final action. Test audiences hissed and booed? The main plot of The Golden Compass focuses on agents of the church systematically kidnapping children and forcibly tearing them from these daemons.
Maybe the timing was just off in general. The Golden Compass arrived at the end of , just a few months before the one-two punch of Iron Man and The Dark Knight would kickstart the golden age of superhero movies and further center Hollywood filmmaking around pop-culture franchises. Twilight was a fixture of teen culture not just because it had monsters in it but also because it conjured a riveting love triangle of young people that felt real to fans.
By contrast, The Golden Compass focuses on children. That is not how the book ends. That moral grey area is not a balance Hollywood is good at striking, especially these days. Thankfully, this may not be the last time we see The Golden Compass on screen. You can't expose someone like that to Arctic conditions. I don't think you could expose Nicole Kidman to that either — she probably wouldn't be too excited about it. Kidman did, however, quickly adapt to the particular demands of simulating her daemon, an alluring but vicious golden monkey.
The purpose of fantasy is to stimulate the imagination by immersing us in a world that is not our own: In other words, it's like all fiction, only more so. But the interests of its authors will inevitably emerge, even if dressed in chain mail and funny hats. Tolkien's real passion was for philology, and so The Lord of the Rings is saturated with his invented languages. Lewis used his Narnia series to deliver lessons about Christianity, alternately comforting and priggish.
In His Dark Materials, Pullman builds a fictional Republic of Heaven, encouraging us to make the best possible material world rather than to wait for the afterlife. He was seeking an answer that would satisfy emotionally and intellectually, and I respect that struggle. It's not about anything important. If Pullman's theology is couched in fantastical terms — daemons and Dust rather than souls and salvation — that doesn't make his anticlerical themes any less acute.
While the technology in The Golden Compass is roughly Victorian, with dirigibles and "anbaric power" i. A key plot point in The Golden Compass is the Church's General Oblation Board developing a plan to sever the link between children and their daemons, with horrific results. As Pullman put it bluntly on his Web site, "All too often in human history, churches and priesthoods have set themselves up to rule people's lives in the name of some invisible God and they're all invisible, because they don't exist — and done terrible damage.
In the name of their God, they have burned, hanged, tortured, maimed, robbed, violated and enslaved millions of their fellow-creatures, and done so with the happy conviction that they were doing the will of God, and they would go to heaven for it.
That is the religion I hate, and I'm happy to be known as its enemy. So when Weitz let it be known that in his version of The Golden Compass , the Magisterium would be more generalized and as much political as religious, there must have been sighs of relief at New Line.
But there were also howls of protest from fans worried that the book's themes were being neutered. After all, doesn't the trilogy climax in The Amber Spyglass with the death of a "demented and powerless" God? Weitz says, "We're not dealing as directly as the books with a parallel-Earth version of the Catholic Church, which some fans probably see as a massive wimp-out, but I see that as actually a broadening of what the film is about. I had a bunch of conversations with Pullman about this — as far as he's concerned, it really is a statement against dogmatic authority of any kind.
I think people who appreciate these issues in the book won't be disappointed with the film. I honestly do. Totalitarian ways of thought are just as bad when they're inspired by religion or by some other body of doctrine. Religion is at its best when it has absolutely no political power. The studio has already had to engage in preliminary spin control; after the Catholic Kidman was criticized for taking part in the movie, she said "I wouldn't be able to do this film if I thought it was at all anti-Catholic.
It's a rare tent pole movie that leads its director to medieval mythology, but The Golden Compass is an unusual best seller. Eight months pass since Elliott and Green are seen flying in their airship, during which the movie gathers some negative buzz: You can practically see the flop sweat on the brows of New Line executives.
But a minute reel of highlights shown at Cannes and Comic-Con is genuinely thrilling, full of vaulted Magisterium buildings, witches sailing through the air, epic battles on the frozen tundra.
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