Though Lyra is undoubtedly charming in the way she outwits even the most calculating adults, she’s focused more on saving her friends and retaining her own youthful imagination than she is deciding what romantic partner to choose or what classes to take.
By contrast, The Golden Compass focuses on children. Twilight was a fixture of teen culture not just because it had monsters in it but also because it conjured a riveting love triangle of young people that felt real to fans. Perhaps the difference in success there highlights one big reason that The Golden Compass didn’t take off: It’s not quite YA, the genre that has dominated millennial pop culture nearly as much as superheroes. Two years later, in fact, director Chris Weitz would steer the first Twilight sequel, New Moon, to more than $700 million at the box office. The Golden Compass arrived at the end of 2007, just a few months before the one-two punch of Iron Man and The Dark Knight would kickstart the golden age of superhero movies and further center Hollywood filmmaking around pop-culture franchises. Maybe the timing was just off in general.
MOVIE THE GOLDEN COMPASS 2 MOVIE
Despite New Line’s attempts to dial down the religious critique, the movie was still protested by organizations like the Catholic League years later, best picture winner Spotlight renewed a global conversation about abusive priests and was met with near-universal praise.
But since The Golden Compass doesn’t even say “the church” once, the story’s central metaphor becomes almost incomprehensible. Since the daemons stand in not just for characters’ personality but also their sexuality, this is a pretty subtle metaphor for priest child abuse. The main plot of The Golden Compass focuses on agents of the church systematically kidnapping children and forcibly tearing them from these daemons. His fantasy world imagined everyone having “daemons” that embodied their inner essence in the form of animal companions. So the author addressed the issue (which is at the center of his novels’ critique of corrupt religious orthodoxy) from a sideways angle. Though the massive Catholic sex-abuse scandal is now something that can be openly discussed on shows like Netflix’s The Keepers and Oscar-winning movies like Spotlight, it wasn’t like that when Pullman was writing his books. The main plot of The Golden Compass involves church officials committing monstrous abuses against children. Lyra’s world is dominated by a powerful theocracy, known in the movie solely as “the Magisterium” but referred to as “the Church” quite often in Pullman’s books. Though Pullman has claimed (especially around the movie’s release) that His Dark Materials is not a specific critique of the Catholic Church, it’s hard to think otherwise.
There were other indications that New Line wanted the movie to be something it wasn’t. Christopher Lee is also in the movie for some reason, playing a vaguely Saruman-like church bureaucrat, for all of like five minutes. But it’s hard to take McKellen seriously as a noble warrior when everyone already associates his voice with the wise wizard Gandalf. McKellen was actually recast in the role by New Line against Chris Weitz’s wishes (the director had originally cast British theater actor Nonso Anozie), and you see the studio straining for The Golden Compass to be another The Lord of the Rings. Worse than that, Ian McKellen is a strange fit for the armored polar bear Iorek Byrnison. Casting Sam Elliott as Lee Scoresby is a little too on-the-nose, taking the Texan aeronaut so far into the banalest Texas stereotypes that he never feels like a real character. But after that, things start to fall off.
Dakota Blue Richards made her debut in the film as protagonist (and daughter of Asriel and Coulter) Lyra Belacqua, and capably captures Lyra’s imaginative wit. Coulter, and the witch queen Serafina Pekkala. Daniel Craig, Nicole Kidman, and Eva Green seem like the literal living embodiments of the Arctic explorer Lord Asriel, the enigmatic manipulator Mrs. On paper, the cast seems almost perfectly suited to their roles.
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