It's OK, the Golden Compass is crap.
We hired out “The Golden Compass” on the weekend and just to reassure anyone who was concerned about any subversive effect of the screen adaptation of Phillip “I want to kill off God in the minds of children” Pullman’s books, it turns out the movie is rambling, poorly-plotted, incomprehensible rubbish. It has cutesy animal “daemons” and flying witches that turn up completely at random, and something about angry polar bears and an old apparently omniscient guy with a balloon, and some secret shadowy organisation that’s stealing kids and cutting their ferrets off so that Nicole Kidman can have a less angry monkey….or something……..
It came across as though they had pulled whatever was the most exciting paragraph out of each chapter (whatever had the coolest set piece and most wooden dialogue) and then jammed them together one after the other with no logical connectivity. Kind of like the Golden Compass, really - a series of unconnected pictures which somehow gives staggering insight, as long as you have the magical powers to read them. I’m afraid I lacked the magical powers required to make sense of this confused set-piece train wreck.
It’s also horrendously, unforgivably cliche-ridden. By a quarter of the way through, my wife and I were playing “guess the next line” - which was usually something like “No, you can’t come with me… this is something I have to do for myself…” or something equally cringeworthy and lazy. Had it been a drinking game, I’d probably still be drunk now.
Not having read the books, I’m trying to work out whether it’s a poor rendition of a good book, or a faithful rendition of a crap book…… but I suspect that, in fact, it is a poor rendition of a crap book, since that’s the only explanation I can come up with for how you could make a movie that awful.