Long Form Review - The Golden Compass

(Note: Usually movie reviews are pushed to the sidebar, but my thoughts on this movie filled up way too much of it. Which means it really needs its own entry. Vague and specific spoilers abound.)

The Golden Compass - Short Form: A good movie with above par action and acting, that is limited by its story in a very significant way. Also, armored bears! (RAWR!, etc.)


This movie is an object lesson that shows that the eternal debate on whether movies are better/worse than the books that they're based on is utterly useless. Because this movie is a near perfect retelling of the book (Or more accurately, all of the book but the ending. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.) and it is completely hamstrung as a movie because of that.

I would go so far as to say that it's one of the most faithful adaptation of a book into a movie that I've ever seen. Virtually nothing is changed, good or bad, from exactly how the entire plot is presented in the book. When the book had extended scenes of pure exposition, the movie paused the action to have some old British people yammer on for a while. When the book introduced the mythology of witches out of the utter blue without explanation or reason, so went the movie. When the book freaking rips off the jaw of an armored bear and then snaps its neck... well you see where I'm going with this. (Aside: As soon as I realized that they were following the book so closely, I could not wait for the bear fighting scene. And I was not disappointed. That was awesome.)

What I'm getting at, is that book purists should be theoretically thrilled by the adaptation. With the exception of a copy/replace job on every instance of "Church" with "Authority," very little was excised from the meat of the book. Only the flow of the movie suffers - to save time (not a long movie by any means) they often cut from pivotal scene A to pivotal scene B without resolving how they got from A to B. The director never lets the story down to save on length.

But the problem is, the story doesn't translate overly well into a movie. Yes, the action is extraordinarily well done and thrilling, but the whole story has too much of a measured pace and far too much required backstory to be super effective. The book worked because it had time to set up the idea of daemons and the rules involved, and then to build up the world and the mythology around the alternate timeline. The movie has no such luxury - resorting to condensed character traits in single lines of dialogue, clunky expository speeches in place of long conversations, and bizarre announcements of intent. It all just comes off as awkward.

The worst example of this is the entrance of the witch, who literally seems to serve no purpose to the story whatsoever except to act as a deus ex machina device for the ending. And while it sort of is in the book as well, the witches perform a larger function in the book (keying in on the prophecy - the one thing that was cut from the movie that it really could have used), which makes their use less egregious in book form. In the movie it was akin to having a wizard appear midway through your plot for no other reason than the fact that you'll need some magical reinforcements in about 20 minutes.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good movie, but it could have been much better had they took a cue from other really successful adaptations (e.g. the Lord of the Rings writers) and how they adapted the sources to fit their needs. Because really, the LotR books are a perfect example of an awesome story that would be terrible in movie form.

Follow along: In the book version of Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo's decision to leave his home and go on to Rivendale on his little ring adventure is about 8 months long, both in planning and execution, with liberal stops along the way to meet magical creatures and get eaten by old trees. It would be utterly boring to watch that play out on a screen, despite how nice a travelogue and expository device it was to set you up in the mythology.

So what did the writers do? Cut all the dithering about and made it compelling to watch: race against time to escape dark riders, picking up friends as they go along, taking up maybe a week of total time, most of which is entirely offscreen.

Similarly in the case of The Golden Compass, I think it could have easily been adapted in a similar manner. Take some liberties with the source material to make it flow better. Don't be afraid to cut a scene or two of exposition to make time for other scenes to end naturally before jumping to the next item on the list. Fill in the exposition naturally with reasonable asides in those scenes, and trust the audience not to miss things. Done properly (like in LotR) literary purists won't whine (too much) and your movie benefits by being more cohesive.

Or alternatively - since you planned on pissing off the purists anyways by ending the movie TWO CHAPTERS BEFORE THE END OF THE BOOK, why even care to follow the story so closely?

Seriously, the ending is the best part of the book! (Bear fighting excluded, obviously) You even put the goddamn foreshadowing of the end right there in the movie ("It says I'm bringing him what he needs."). It's like you're trying to purposely enrage people who read the book. Yeah, yeah, no one likes a downer ending in a kids' movie, but guess what? It's not a kids' movie any more than it is a kids' book. Mature themes abound. Stick to your guns or go home.

Grr. Don't mind me. I really did like the movie. I just hate squandered potential.