Movie Review: The Golden Compass
The Golden Compass (2007)–***
It’s a great feeling to walk in to a theater skeptical of the movie you are about to watch only to have that skepticism wash away. The Golden Compass, the latest fantasy film released in a market awash in ho-hum genre releases, is the first film outside of The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter that lives up to its promised spectacle.
Of course, part of the spectacle are the warrior polar bears known in The Golden Compass as Ice Bears. Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) dreams of meeting a real Ice Bear and of other spectacular adventures while living and learning at a stuffy formal university. The young girl is stuck there because her scientist uncle Asriel (Daniel Craig) is out doing his own adventuring, traveling to the arctic north to prove the existence of a cosmic material called dust that connects the different universes.
Asriel’s work, though supported by the scholars at the university, the Magisterium, a secretive body of doctrinal zealots, consider his work to be heresy. They’ll do anything to stop Asriel, including sending the luminescent, but ill-intentioned Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) to kidnap Lyra. She lures the young girl out of the school with the promise of taking Lyra adventuring. “I’ve had an audience with the King of the Ice Bears,” she tells Lyra, hooking the girl instantly.
What Coulter doesn’t know is that Lyra has possession of an artifact long thought to have been destroyed by the Magisterium: an Alethiometer. The dust-powered compass isn’t put to work until Lyra exposes Coulter as the head of the Magisterium’s G.O.B.-lers, a group that steals lower class kids to use in secret experiments. Lyra rejects the frills of her life with Coulter and runs from the evil woman, setting out on a compass-guided adventure she had long hoped for.
Lyra eventually does meet an Ice Bear named Iorek Byrnison (Ian McKellan) after she is rescued by gyptians, an group of water-travelling gypsies. There’s an aeronaut/cowboy played by Sam Elliot. And there are witches. And souls that live outside the body in the form of an animal. They are called daemons. Oh, and the daemons burst into sparkling dust when the person they belong to is killed.
Forgive me if that last paragraph started to sound a tad like a 5-year-old trying to explain the Golden Compass universe. It’s hard to approach the film without a child-like glee. The Golden Compass succeeds where other fantasy films, from Narnia to Terabithia, have failed when it envelopes the audience in a mystical world.
The Golden Compass, though not short on magic or myth, does jettison the superficiality that plagued recent fantasy films. Better still, it never tries to out visualize Lord of the Rings or out adventure Harry Potter, instead relying on its assets. One of those assets is the film’s Babe-like quality to inspire audiences to challenge conventional thinking, making The Golden Compass into a rare children’s film with a welcome intellectual bent.
Intellect aside, even the lighter weight moments in The Golden Compass have joyous quality to them. Whether it’s watching Lyra hold tightly to the back of her galloping Ice Bear protector Iorek or meeting Sam Elliot at a Norway port, The Golden Compass holds itself together and, under the surprising direction of Chris Weitz (American Pie), guides us to a delightful finish.
The Golden Compass starring Dakota Blue Richards, Daniel Craig, Nicole Kidman, Ian McKellan and Sam Elliot, directed by Chris Weitz, opens Friday, Dec. 7 in theaters everywhere.
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