The Golden Compass

[hwango]

It was very pretty. The visual effects were very nice, the bears were particularly nifty, and I was pleased by a lot of the acting. Overall, I quite enjoyed it. However...warnings of major changes to the book (which are by their nature spoilers) under the cut.

They left out the ending. Seriously, the movie leaves out the last 3 chapters of the book. I suspect this was done to make the ending much happier, and to dodge the most explicit references to religion. The Magisterium does still have some religious trappings and most of the themes I recall from the earlier parts of the book are still there, but they don't actually talk about sin and god and whatnot with those exact words. It takes away some of the punch, but in a way makes the message a bit more subversive and subtle.

I'm reserving judgement on how much of a butchering of the book this is until we see whether the other books will also be made into movies. Lord of the Rings moved a few scenes around for the movie adaptations, and I'll forgive His Dark Materials if they do something similar and the missing bits from Compass end up in Knife.

Comments

The Northern Lights

[gunthersdncemix.livejournal.com]

BTW - I remembered to look it up and confirmed that the title is different for the British Version, but only for the first book. Here is the Wikipedia page. It also claims that the trilogy was his response to the Chronicles of Narnia.

Re: The Northern Lights

[hwango.livejournal.com]

I took a look at my copy when I got home, and saw that according to the copyright info it was first released under that name. I never knew that before, though.

I thought we had already talked about the fact that it was meant to be sort of an anti-Narnia. It was my understanding that he was upset that fantasy fiction intended for children was being used as a recruiting tool for religion, and wrote his own series casting religion in a rather different light.