I remember seeing this film in the cinema, and being acutely aware of the extent to which I was wasting my life every time Lyra got her compass out and treated us to another almost identical 90-second animation about dust. There's no mystery or intrigue or elegance just a woman we don't know babbling on about dust and demons and compasses in a vaguely off-putting manner. There's no baby wizard being left on a doorstep. There's no "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away". Right from the word go, it forces a ton of information onto you in an incredibly ugly way. You just have to watch it to understand why it underperformed. By trying not to offend anybody, the film managed to alienate everyone.īut that's not the real reason the film did badly. However, this watering-down only succeeded in annoying secular groups (who really wanted to see a $180m epic about one man's suspicions about the Pope) as well as Catholics (who got wind of this new film being made about how awful they all were, and kicked off as a result).
The book made it perfectly clear that Philip Pullman had a specific problem with the Catholic church, but the film diluted his fury down to a general disenchantment with all dogmatic belief systems.
The main reason cited for the failure of The Golden Compass was its treatment of religion. forbade the very mention of Dust" – Serafina Pekkala "The ruling power, fearing any truth but their own.
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That's quite a feat.īut what could have possibly gone wrong with an adaptation of a children's book about a plot to murder God, set in a world full of too many characters with hard-to-pronounce names that was overly concerned about explaining dust, and was released at a time when the public's tolerance for too-long, CGI-heavy fantasy adaptations was at an all-time low? The Golden Compass is being repeated on TV today, so this is the perfect time for a closer inspection. A bear punches another bear's jaw off in it, and it's still rubbish. The film in this world is The Golden Compass, and it's rubbish.
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And worlds like ours, where the series crapped the bed after a single bloated, confused outing that was mired in meddling and flaccid compromise, and succeeded only in enraging everybody that it was supposed to pander to. Worlds where Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy was turned into a series of blockbuster movies, each better than the last.
There are many universes and many Earths parallel to each other.