The Golden Compass

Day 211 - 7/30/09 - Movie #207

BEFORE: Another fantasy movie based on a children's book, this one got really bad reviews and seems really complicated. Let's see if it lives up (down?) to its rep...

THE PLOT: In a parallel universe, young Lyra Belacqua journeys to the far North to save her best friend and other kidnapped children from terrible experiments by a mysterious organization.

AFTER: Man, and I thought "Dungeons & Dragons" was confusing - I had to look up the plot of this film on the web, right after watching it, to even START to understand it. As best as I can tell, in this parallel universe people's souls are housed in animal companions called "daemons", if a person's daemon gets hurt they feel it, and if they die, their daemon dies also. Somewhere up North, someone is drawing power in the form of "dust" from another universe (dust being a substance that exists between universes...or something) Also, poor kids are being kidnapped or killed, and one little girl has the power to tell the truth by reading the symbols on a magical compass. That's it, as far as I get before getting confused...

I can't recall if this movie was criticized for being overly Christian (like the "Narnia" series) or somewhat Satanic - but if they didn't want parents to freak out, they should have called the animals "familiars", instead of a word that sounds like "demons" - it's not like you can see the name's spelling in a movie! The daemons of children are constantly shifting, they can look like almost any animal before they "settle" into one form - but in a movie, this makes it incredibly difficult to follow, with characters that are always changing shape!

The best character is a giant polar bear, voiced by Ian McKellen - if you think polar bears are kinda neat, and want to see them talk, fight and drink booze, this is the movie for you! Sam Elliott manages to (once again) make a movie better, and Nicole Kidman plays a stone-cold bitch! Unfortunately, this all feels like a set-up for a more exciting sequel that may never get made - it raises a lot of questions that don't get answered.

RATING: 4 out of 10 parkas.