Word: compassion
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...Line's tough last couple of years at the box office has also magnified the studio's need for a sure hit like The Hobbit. Shaye and Lynne's latest attempt to recreate the box office magic of Rings, the fantasy adaptation The Golden Compass, underperformed, with $25 million at the box office its opening weekend...
...edgy relationship of the heroine Lyra and her would-be ward Mrs. Coulter, played by Kidman as the apotheosis and parody of divine decadence. The Magisterium's own Mata Hari, Coulter takes on the challenge of deflecting Lyra's mission and stealing the child's most prized possession, a compass that can tell the truth and see the future...
...Watching this rough sketch of a better movie, I thought of an ideal director for The Golden Compass: Terry Gilliam, the wildly imaginative Monty Python alumnus who's equally at home in fractured fairy tales (Jabberwocky, The Brothers Grimm) and the voluptuous visualizing of otherworldly dictatorships (Brazil). But Gilliam is a handful for studio heads; he has a high ratio of aborted projects. To hire him would have taken balls on New Line's part, and quite possibly an financial death wish...
...this for Weitz: he got the movie made, even in its current gelded form. But there's something missing, beyond the iconoclastic theology, in this perfectly OK, blandly underwhelming superproduction. The movie lacks an elevating passion, a cohesive vision, a soul. It's as if The Golden Compass has misplaced its artistic compass. Somebody stole its daemon...
...Will the sequels get made, by Weitz or someone more gifted? Strictly on profit-and-loss terms, I'd guess no. The Golden Compass is unlikely to reach the LOTR stratosphere, and a company doesn't keep making money-draining pictures just to complete a trilogy. Remember, too, it's in the second and third books that Pullman revs up the blasphemy. Those film adaptations would have to be either offensive or unrecognizable...