Word: golden
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...Director-screenwriter Chris Weitz's film version of the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is meant to be a blockbuster for all major moviegoing demographics, from six to 16. Wreathed in lavish CGI effects, The Golden Compass traces the quest of the 12-year-old Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) to find a missing friend and, eventually, to save her world. On the way to her destiny she's imprisoned by a glamorous vamp (Nicole Kidman), befriended by a talking polar bear (the talking is done by Ian McKellen) and accompanied by her own Jiminy Cricket...
...little to do with its success, or with impeding it. People of all ages love a ripping yarn, which this is; and The Lord of the Rings had established an appetite for multi-volume fantasy novels. (The trilogy's initial book, called Northern Lights in the U.K. and The Golden Compass in the U.S., was published two years before the first of the Harry Potter books came...
...Afterword to Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov wrote that one of the subjects taboo to American publishers was that of "the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106." New Line, having invested something like $180 million in The Golden Compass, is similarly scared of its antireligious content. The company that boldly greenlighted Peter Jackson's $300 million Hobbit ambitions before a frame of the first movie was shot, and made billions from riding that risk, hasn't said yes to films two and three of the Pullman books - although...
...answer to that leading question about blasphemy in The Golden Compass, it would be a resounding "Huh?" If moviegoers are unaware of the Is-God-Bad? debate, they simply will not notice any theological elements, pro or con. That's how rigorously Weitz has secularized and sanitized the novel. Pullman's conception of the Magisterium, the ecclesiastical hierarchy that kidnaps and tortures children (it wants to separate kids from their "daemons," their very essences), is now an oppressive but vague dictatorship that is part Orwell's 1984, part Star Wars' Empire. Weitz also excised the last three chapters...
...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...