A Girl With a Sword

Golden Compass--kind of soulless

The Golden Compass was a big disappointment. I forget about CGI sometimes and then I'm watching a movie and I'm like, "it doesn't feel right," you know? Sad. It reminded me of the Narnia movie from a couple years ago, too clean, the animals looked like nothing, I mean, cartoons would be a better idea. And what was with all the epic battles, there were at least five. I was unimpressed by the Lyra girl, there was nothing memorable there. She ran around and said her lines very nicely and all, but she brought absolutely nothing to a character. I hate this, I hate that directors think they can make movies out of books without adding anything of their own. What's the point? What's the point of watching it if reading it would give me a better experience? I want new insight, I want commentary, and I don't want you hiding the author's main point behind silly CGI polar bears and something referred to only as "The Magesterium." Nicole Kidman was good, though, she brought something. Something scary.

What they really missed, I thought, was the world. I don't think it could even be conveyed through a film, the magic of a world that runs on ambaric power and has disciplines like experimental theology. I thought they did the daemon thing pretty well, for what they had to go on, although filling in the information through the dialogue felt kind of stilted: "it's horrible to see a person without a daemon," "when you get smacked it hurts me too". It made the battle scenes much more terrifying when you had to watch people's souls exploding when they died. It was really too plastic, though, the books themselves are so rich and it was like they had to cut everything away from them and then kind of stick it back together in order to make it into a movie. Ironic in a movie about people getting their souls cut out--that it could get by without a soul of it's own.

Okay, bad metaphor. Here is a picture of Eva Green, to make us all feel better: