It's a shame this wasn't a better adaptation. The books were fantastic and I would have liked to have seen the whole trilogy done with this level of production value.Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) is a young girl living on the grounds of Jordan College in a parallel universe where people's souls live in the form of animals outside their bodies. Her uncle Asriel (Daniel Craig) has set off on an expedition to discover the truth about Dust, a mystical substance that flows between worlds, but the Magisterium condemns his research as heresy. They have employed the coldly beautiful Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) to conduct experiments on kidnapped children in the far north. One of the kids taken is Lyra's friend, Roger (Ben Walker). She sets off to discover the truth about everything, with the help of a magical artifact called the Golden Compass.
The books obviously have a lot more substance but the filmmakers did what they could to hit the high notes. It was, ironically, panned by the Catholic Church and flopped at the box office, though it did win an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Sadly, I found this in the $5 bin at Best Buy so it did not have some sort of resurgence in the home market, either. This is just one of those "if only" films, although, if the many universes theory is true, somewhere out there is a universe where this did well and Transformers never made a red cent.
No comments:
Post a Comment