The Guardian has published a four-star review of "The Golden Compass": "It has no other challengers as this year's big Christmas movie."
The Golden Compass
4 stars
Thirteen-year-old British actor Dakota Blue Richards, left, stars opposite Nicole Kidman in The Golden Compass. Photograph: Laurie Sparham/New Line Cinema
If Darth Vader wore a blond wig, a slinky dress and a dab of Chanel behind each ear, he could hardly be as evil as Nicole Kidman, playing the gorgeous villainess Mrs Coulter in this spectacular new movie version of Northern Lights, the opening episode of Philip Pullman's fantasy series His Dark Materials.
Pullman reportedly suggested Kidman for the role. Even if he hadn't, Kidman herself would have been kicking her agent's door in to get it. This is the very best sort of part for her: statuesque, elegant, seductive, with a hint of cold steel. In many ways, it's her juiciest character since the sociopathic meteorologist in To Die For.
Mrs Coulter's unspeakable plan is to get the feisty teenage heroine Lyra into her clutches and, among other dastardly projects, grab Lyra's precious Alethiometer, or Golden Compass: a magic, fob-watch-type contraption which tells not time, but truth itself.
Lyra is played by Dakota Blue Richards, who with a name like that should really be a 27-year-old country singer from the US. Actually, she's a 13-year-old acting newcomer from Brighton, and she does well, although her rough "urchin" accent comes and goes.
The Golden Compass is set in a retro-futurist version of the real world: a faintly Gilliamesque place of bizarrely crowded neo-classic cities and Heath Robinson flying machines. Here, human beings all have their own "daemons", like witches' familiars, but benign, shape-shifting essences that incarnate that person's human spirit.
It is a world ruled over by the Magisterium, a powerful mind control cult. Boldly contesting the Magisterium is Lyra's adored uncle and guardian, the gallant Lord Asriel, who, like Indiana Jones, has a glamorous career portfolio. Asriel is a man of action, mystical seer, anthropologist and Oxford don. From his travels in the frozen north, he has found evidence of other worlds, other existences. He is thus suspected of heresy by the Magisterium, keen to impose a kind of Vatican-Caliphate-Soviet rule over all minds. Its agent, Mrs Coulter, is set to work on Lyra and also pursues a horrible plan against children generally.
Asriel is played by Daniel Craig, sporting a distinctive, non-Bond beard for the occasion, and he is a fellow of Jordan College, Oxford, which allows Lyra to live there in a little attic room and also grants her the very remarkable privilege of dining at High Table.
In her battle with the forces of regimented thinking and evil generally, Lyra finds herself making common cause with a wildly diverse band of brothers, including a cowboy-adventurer played by Sam Elliott, nomadic grandees played by Jim Carter and Tom Courtenay, and a highly aggressive polar bear called Iorek Byrnison, voiced by Ian McKellen, who has a very violent moment of bear-on-bear action with a hated usurper of his royal status. It's so violent, incidentally, that this scene might almost rule out some of the younger audience.
As with many adaptations of this sort, a lot of the novel's supporting background material which might acclimatise us to the story's strange and distinctive world has been stripped out.
You're just plunged straight into the action and have to get used to this bewildering, exotic new universe as best you can. The effect is interesting and alienating, though the tiniest bit more absurd than I think Philip Pullman would have intended. It's not hard to see which buttons this movie is hitting: Narnia, Hobbits, Hogwarts, Star Wars. Christopher Lee has a small part - and I very much hope he is given more to do in succeeding episodes.
The crowded imaginary universe of The Golden Compass takes some getting used to, and in some ways, as a non-follower of the Pullman books, I have still to be entirely sold on it. But it certainly looks wonderful, with epic dash and a terrific central performance from Nicole Kidman, who may come to dominate our children's nightmares the way Robert Helpmann's Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang once did ours. It has no other challengers as this year's big Christmas movie.
4 comments - Add yours
#1
Come on the Guardian!
# November 27, 2007 20:22 by Pilgrim
#2
“If Darth Vader wore a blond wig, a slinky dress and a dab of Chanel behind each ear, he could hardly be as evil as Nicole Kidman, playing the gorgeous villainess Mrs Coulter in this spectacular new movie version of Northern Lights, the opening episode of Philip Pullman’s fantasy series His Dark Materials.”
Haha, lol, how evil is she?
# November 27, 2007 23:33 by fever
#3
Have you read some of Peter Bradshaw’s other reviews? This man gives nothing higher than a 3/5 normally. For him to give Golden Compass a 4/5 speaks volumes.
# November 28, 2007 05:39 by Stealthwolf
#4
The Times and Daily Mail have not been nearly as nice though in their reviews.
# November 28, 2007 21:13 by SantaFromtheNorth