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Dec. 9th, 2007
The Golden Compass
Dec. 9th, 2007 11:46 pmI just came from seeing the Golden Compass with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
boredtech. I had seen the trailer, had read some comments about the books, and promptly picked them up and read them. I think the books are excellent; interesting language, amazing alternative universes, great characters, very hard to put down. They are, however, also very brutal and get preachy and just plain weird towards the end of the trilogy, to the point that began to put me off a fair bit. Regardless, I was eager to see what the movie did with the story.
Visually, it's excellent. The various creatures and milieus of the books have come to life in a very satisfying fashion. The actors are great, Sam Elliott in particular is great, and Dakota Blue Richards, playing the main character Lyra, is absolutely adorable. I'm not even going to mention Nicole Kidman -- if you've seen the trailers, you know how she looks.
As far as the story goes, however, it didn't fare so well. Ebert seemed to like the movie quite a bit, but to me it glossed over way too much, and failed in properly introducing many relevant characters, and still didn't have enough time to dwell on the various environments to properly set the mood. Some scenes towards the end came a bit short on technical merits, reminding me of Sci-Fi channel production with shaking cameras and collapsing fake walls. Also, the neat Nordic names from the book are probably going to be very challenging for any moviegoers to wrap their heads around. It's one thing to read about Iorek Byrnison, another trying to guess the spelling when hearing it spoken. In the end the entire affair felt hurried and sketchy, and I'm not sure how the more brutal turns of events are going to turn out if there is going to be another movie -- the biggest one having been swiftly sidestepped by ending the movie before the final chapter of the first book.
If you haven't read the books, I'm really curious what you thought of the movie. I thought it could have been a fair bit better, though visually it was very close to my mental version. I'm also quite jittery about what is going to be in store.
boredtech. I had seen the trailer, had read some comments about the books, and promptly picked them up and read them. I think the books are excellent; interesting language, amazing alternative universes, great characters, very hard to put down. They are, however, also very brutal and get preachy and just plain weird towards the end of the trilogy, to the point that began to put me off a fair bit. Regardless, I was eager to see what the movie did with the story.Visually, it's excellent. The various creatures and milieus of the books have come to life in a very satisfying fashion. The actors are great, Sam Elliott in particular is great, and Dakota Blue Richards, playing the main character Lyra, is absolutely adorable. I'm not even going to mention Nicole Kidman -- if you've seen the trailers, you know how she looks.
As far as the story goes, however, it didn't fare so well. Ebert seemed to like the movie quite a bit, but to me it glossed over way too much, and failed in properly introducing many relevant characters, and still didn't have enough time to dwell on the various environments to properly set the mood. Some scenes towards the end came a bit short on technical merits, reminding me of Sci-Fi channel production with shaking cameras and collapsing fake walls. Also, the neat Nordic names from the book are probably going to be very challenging for any moviegoers to wrap their heads around. It's one thing to read about Iorek Byrnison, another trying to guess the spelling when hearing it spoken. In the end the entire affair felt hurried and sketchy, and I'm not sure how the more brutal turns of events are going to turn out if there is going to be another movie -- the biggest one having been swiftly sidestepped by ending the movie before the final chapter of the first book.
If you haven't read the books, I'm really curious what you thought of the movie. I thought it could have been a fair bit better, though visually it was very close to my mental version. I'm also quite jittery about what is going to be in store.