Golden Compass

In the evening we go for our weekly film. You can tell it's getting near XXXXXmas as there's not a lot on, so we see the Golden Compass. I'm really not sure I can bear (that's almost a pun by the way) to review this. I did see a review on the internet entitled the 'Golden Turd' and nearly just put up a link to that but here goes...

The story surrounds a very uncharismatic young girl called Lyra, not Lycra as I first thought, who is given a golden compass to help her find a kidnapped friend. This leads to her ending up in an airship with Nicole Kidman, which is traumatic enough for starters, but Kidman is a weirdo who hates it when girls wear their handbags in the house? Then we get 'introduced; to loads of other characters, who mutter about 'dust' and 'intercision' without really convincing even themselves that they know what they're taking about. The only cool bit is that all the characters have daemons, which are animals that are attached to them which represent their souls. These daemons are CGI generated cats, birds, dogs or even tigers. Kidman gets a monkey, enough said. Is it only me that thinks CGI is now so last century? Let's get back to real animals, much cuter.

The funniest bit of the film was when a dog daemon fell off a rooftop but no one else laughed. Although plenty of people laughed at other random points and I couldn't really see why, or was it just because of the bad acting or senseless plot.

Daniel Craig turns up, does a touch of James Bond, for all of about ten minutes, and then disappears again. He isn't the only one; several characters turn up, do a one scene, and vanish. This, unfortunately, isn't true of Kidman, who receives far too much screen time.

Then suddenly they're all tramping off to North Pole because the compass tells them to, to look for the ring, or is that another story? The movie also borrows all the bad bits from Harry Potter, Narnia etc too. There our heroine befriends a giant polar bear, who I think is drunk. I'm trying to get to sleep at this point but for some reason it's not working, it was probably the armoured polar beer fight that disturbed me.



The film is adapted from the Phillip Pullman novel, which I haven't read but seemingly most people who have are appalled at the butchering of the book, apparently the film even ends four chapters back from the end of the book. It was also supposed to be story for teenagers but it appears to have been blatantly dumbed down and aimed at younger kids, which even insults their intelligence. The books have been criticized for being a bit controversial on some religious topics but that must have been dropped from the film or else I dozed through that bit.

Overall a confusing, poorly acted, badly directed mish-mash of a film. Apparently two sequels are due. Oh dear.