Starring:
Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Ian McKellen (voice), Eva Green, Christopher Lee and Dakota Blue Richards

Based on the first book of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, The Golden Compass takes you to a land of imagination, adventure and not to forget, armored bears! In a world not so different from our own, children are disappearing throughout Europe, victims of the Gobblers (General Oblation Board). The aristocracy and the Christian Church (a brutal dictatorship that kills anyone who disagrees with them, but this is left out of the movie for the most part) turn their heads since those disappearing are Gyptions or servants and not members of their own class. After a friend of a young child named Lyra Belacqua goes missing and she realizes that she has met the person responsible, she escapes her Oxford. With the help of her daemon (a soul that lives on the outside of the body) and an instrument called an alethiometer which allows her to see truth, she sets out to the north to find her uncle and the reason why kids are being taken from their homes.

Anyone who has read the book is going to be thrilled and disappointed by the film adaptation. The casting of Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra worked perfectly. Her performance stands out even more than that of Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, who are also brilliantly cast. Not to forget the wonderful Ian McKellen, who is the voice for the bear king Iorek Byrnison, gives the large animal a sense of danger, wisdom and even at times, compassion. The part that makes the movie just another big budget fantasy is the decision to leave out the critiques of religion run amok to make it more family friendly and appealing to the evangelicals, who have a long record of hating anything that the film industry releases. In doing so, they are limiting what they can do in the next two movies in the series as the plot grows thicker and this theme becomes the backbone of the story. Nevertheless, the movie is visually beautiful and is worth seeing, even though it lacks some of the magic that made the books great.

Tags: movies