Review of The Golden Compass (2007) by Harry W — 31 Mar 2014

The Golden Compass wasn't a book I ever read or a story I knew the first thing about, but finding myself in the mood for a fantasy adventure and liking the look of the visual aspects on the film from the surface, I decided to give The Golden Compass a shot.

The story in The Golden Compass is rather convoluted. The entire universe that the film is set in doesn't make too much sense and isn't explained so viewers are likely to be left asking a lot of questions which are not answered in the film due to lax storytelling. The story in The Golden Compass is essentially just another fantasy story with the only thing to set it apart from many other films being that the talking animals are the main theme in the film. Aside from that, The Golden Compass does not have well written characters or a story worth following because it is simply dull and childish. It is just another fantasy film and were it not for the high budget imagery it would be easily forgettable. I mean I was forgetting what was happening in the story as it was unfolding in front of me due to the fact that the film did not clarify just what kind of a world the film is set in, nor did it look into the minds of the characters of the story. It reduces everything to being paper-thin fantasy and weak storytelling which makes the entire experience rather confusing and far from appealing.

Director Chris Weitz clearly fails to find the importance in the source novel or the true theme of fantastical adventure. It is clear that the Anti-religious elements have been omitted at studio request to make the entertainment more family friendly which is just ridiculous, but Chris Weitz simply fails to harness what else there is in the story and give it the meaningful fantasy element that made the novel a bestseller. Chris Weitz proves to be better as someone adapting another person's script into an animated film than he is att adapting a film himself as the director and writer. The Golden Compass is a misfire on behalf of him.

The visual style in The Golden Compass feels rather derivative. While many of its visual elements are rather effective and eccentric, a lot of it feels like it has all been seen before in many other fantasy films based on novels that were adapted in the 2000's. One scene in particular has many characters eating in a large hall which looks way too much like all the characters eating at the Hogwarts banquet in the Harry Potter movies, and the snowy universe that the story plays out in feels all too much like the world in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. So a lot of the visual experience in The Golden Compass feels like it has all already been seen before which is problematic as the visual aspects of the film attempt to hide the thin storytelling beneath it. And I can't necessarily say that I feel that the Academy Award for Best Visual effects should have gone to The Golden Compass out of all the films it was nominated for. While the visual effects are fairly excellent in creating animals, they don't fuse with the surrounding humans that well. The actors don't interact with the animals well enough for it too feel real, and when you look at the place they take in the visual foreground you can see that the backgrounds feel artificial when placed at the backdrop of actual human beings. The visual effects don't interact with the real world well enough, and so things feel like a mix of an animated film and a live action film. And that kind of hybrid really doesn't deserve to win the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, especially over Transformers which felt more genuine despite being a Michael Bay film about giant battling robots. The way the animals move even feels a bit like an animated film, so I feel as if The Golden Compass would have been a lot better as a film completely animated out of CGI.

Frankly, The Golden Compass' visual elements didn't amaze me, so from there I didn't have anything to really like about the film because it is generally agreed upon that underneath the visual qualities, The Golden Compass is sub-par. So yeah, the film is very far from the kind of quality I could have hoped to enjoy.

And the cast really aren't that impressive either.

Of all the 10,000 little girls who auditioned for the lead role of Lyra Belacqua, the role went to Dakota Blue Richards who spends the first half of the film whining non-stop and the second half of it failing to interact with the animated characters well. I know it's a lot to criticise a 13 year old girl for, but considering that she was able to triumph over 9,999 other girls for the part, you would expect that she would be good. She was simply annoying, and when she wasn't on screen I was enjoying the film more, so that should tell you about how little I enjoyed The Golden Compass. Dakota Blue Richards tries hard and has her moments, but stuck with a thinly scripted character and indifferent direction, she really doesn't come to life as much as she clearly can. At best, she shows off her potential in The Golden Compass.

And I got tired of looking at Nicole Kidman's overbotoxed face really quickly and could hear her Australian accent leaking through as she attempted to sound Engilsh. It was better than her terrible American accent in Days of Thunder, but it is still not a performance which she deserves much praise for, because frankly she is just not a pleasurable sight in The Golden Compass and feels as artificial as the universe itself.

Really, despite having a large cast of talented actors, The Golden Compass has pretty much nothing to boast about, with the exception of the presence of Sam Elliot whose performance manages to get everything right within a limited period of screentime.

So despite Academy Award winning visuals, The Golden Compass is a dull fantasy film with a convoluted plot and weak form of storytelling which ensures that it fails to live up to the quality of its source material and fails to entertain many viewers.