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The Golden Compass Movie Discussion
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And oh god, yes! We got almost no sense in the movie of how bad the touching of the daemon was. One line, one line the precludes the scene, where she makes a comment early on about "worse than touching a daemon with your bare hands!" We when it happens she just passes out. Granted, extraordinarily traumatic events would knock you unconscious, but there was no indication or feeling at all of whether... I mean, hell. For all anyone knew, touching someone's daemon with their bare hands was bad because it put you to sleep. Or Lyra was just weak and couldn't handle it. It could be just socially reprehensible with no real physical consequences. It could just tingle.
Iorek would win, but then three days later Aslan would be walking around like nothing ever happened.
Yeah, but Aslan is God, which means he doesn't exist. So Iorek wins by default.
Bad news about the whole talking bear thing...
Shut up.
shutupshutupshutupshutup Shut up!
Fixed!
Boycott the Very Ending of The Golden Compass
I do recommend people dig up some actual interviews with the guy, he really has some interesting opinions.
All of this has convinced me that I will get no entertainment out of this. Just the same as when I heard the premise for "His Dark Materials," recognized it as something i'd seen a thousand times before, ("I don't believe in God, I'm such a brave edgy rebel.") and put the thing aside.
That's all I have to say on the matter.
The books are not at all about believing or not believing in God and are profoundly original in that respect. It doesn't even get pretentious about its so called "edginess" until maybe the end of the third book, when all the shit hits the fan.
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The books are the opposite of edgy. In the following spoiler I am going to quote from the last page of the last book (warning!) to demonstrate just how very un-edgy they are.
"When?"
"On the beach, just before you tried the alethiometer. He said there wasn't any elsewhere. It was what his father had told you. But there was something else."
"I remember. He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn't live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place."
"He said we had to build something..."
"That's why we needed our full life, Pan. We would have gone with Will and Kirjava, wouldn't we?"
"Yes. Of course! And they would have come with us. But--"
"But then we wouldn't have been able to build it. No one could if they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we've got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we'll build..."
Her hands were resting on his glossy fur. Somewhere in the garden a nightingale was singing, and a little breeze touched her hair and stirred the leaves overhead. All the different bells of the city chimed, once each, this one high, that one low, some close by, others farther off, one cracked and peevish, another grave and sonorous, but agreeing in all their different voices on what the time was, even if some of them got to it a little more slowly than others. In that other Oxford where she and Will had kissed good-bye, the bells would be chiming, too, and a nightingale would be singing, and a little breeze would be stirring the leaves in the Botanic Garden.
"And then what?" said her daemon sleepily. "Build what?"
"The Republic of Heaven," said Lyra.
I feel almost as though I could make an inspirational poster from it. In my opinion, His Dark Materials is not interesting because it offers atheism to children; it is interesting because it exemplifies for the broader culture a sort of atheism that is not best described as edgy--that is warm and moral and caring and good.
And of course they may be a little heavy handed at times, but the fact stands that they are the first succesful attempt to explain that secular, scientific, renaissance, wonder at the world, with all it's love and compassion and beauty. It shows that, the wonder of the universe can remain in a rational outlook.
And it succeeds much more than "unweaving the rainbow" - a book by Darwkins that attempts the same things.
They are extremely important because they present "children" and "adults" with a good example of this mindset. Clearly it has what people might call an agenda, like any good piece of literature has, and it's better for it.
I could wax lyrical about it's excellence for a long time (don't worry I won't), but i do want to say that I think it will go down in history as one of the most important books of our age. I really believe it marks a turning point in our culture. Unless we retreat backwards once again.
Talking of turning points, I think one of the strongest memories most people have is when the first time they realised that their parents were fallible. And that adults in general were often wrong. I remember the day clearly. I had a terrifying evening when I realised, everyone was bumbling through the best they could, no one was really evil, and everyone thought they were right and that they were good.
There are a pitiful amount of novels that really takle that issue and HDM stand above them all. No one in the book is truely evil, everyone has motives, and believes they are doing the right thing. And you can't look to authority figures to tell you the truth. As such Lyra and Will flit between them all on their path to find the truth.
Thats a huge step forward in [strike]childrens[/strike] any literature, and puts in miles ahead of the Narnia books, and LoTRs. It's a massively important book for preparing anyone for the real world.
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(v.minor spoiler about daemons)
I found that quite shocking.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
Death and violence doesn't really present that problem.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
It's kind of ironic how they also cut out the one part of the book that made the whole thing not solely anti-religion.
I particularly liked this in the book as I felt the character was complex, and had his own faults/agendas etc.
Also, a significant time is spent in the book with Lyra agonising over what the master's last words were to her regarding the compass... I was disappointed this was left out.
And gee, here I thought this was just some Harry Potter rip-off.
And here, this is precisely why the Vatican is fucking stupid. Here I was, ready to write this movie off as a clone and probably never see it. And they go and make their idiotic declarations about how a silly movie made baby Jesus cry. Now I'm curious about it and will very probably go see it in the near future.
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But I still would advise against the movie. Having not read the book, much of it seemed out of place and difficult to understand (mostly small details; The primary plot was so densely thrown at you that it's impossible to misunderstand) such as how the book ends before it should. Even having not read the book (and thus not noticing that it was ending 5 chapters too soon) The credits before you get any sense of closure or finality, or even a sense of "Oh okay, this is a good place to properly stop and pick up the next film" No, it just abruptly goes to black and the credits roll.
The reviews, both by critics and ordinary folk alike, seem to agree that this was a bad film.
I've been reading the novel lately and I'm enjoying it quite a bit now that things have picked up speed.
In the movie, they took out that element, using the Magisterium figurehead as the attempted-murderer, and removed the event of Asrial revealing himself as a selfish zealot willing to go as far as to murder one of Lyra's friends in order to achieve his goals.
They basically took out the shades of gray, and reduced it so that the only bad guys in this are the magisterium at this point. This kind of goes completely against what the Author was getting at with his stories.
Really though I was just disappointed that the bears-in-armor scenes weren't cooler.
My 2 cents otherwise is that although the movie managed to show the plot skeleton, it had none of the meat of the book (Starting on the next 2 soon :P). It just felt like they rushed the audience through each event just so they could have it done.
It also didn't have the oomph of other recent fantasy movies, I even enjoyed Narnia more.
I did like the CGI animals though, Iorek was an awesome sight, even if the dialogue with Lyra was stilted (Lordy, was it just me or was the voice actor terrible in that scene??)
Good enough for a rental, but otherwise meh...
Yeah. I also noticed that they axed the Master's reading of the alethiometer which said
It's also going to look really weird when film-Asriel, who is apparently a stand-up guy, murders Roger. That was kind of an OH SO THAT'S WHAT THEY MEANT moment in the book; in film 2 it will more or less come out of nowhere.
Overall, thumbs down--and this is from someone who generally enjoys book-to-film adaptations. LotR and Narnia got good films; the Golden Compass just didn't.
Basically, I remembered a truth compass thing, armoured bears, daemons and Oxford, so I wasn't disappointed. My girlfriend hasn't read the books, but she seemed to follow the story, which I was glad of because I wouldn't have been able to fill in any of the details. The only thing that pissed her off was the ending, but I was already expecting a Fellowship of the Rings-esque pan out to scenery.
On the subject of death and daemons disappearing: arrows sure are effective in Lyra's universe. Seems like if you get shot once, you're dead - no lingering deaths with your daemon huddling pitifully in your arms, just *thunk* *argh* *whoosh*. A battlefield full of the dying would just be so much more depressing when you add in wailing gerbils and dogs.
Also, needed more daemons. So it just happened that every guard had the exact same breed of dog as a daemon? Lazy. A guard on the end with a cocker spaniel or Old English sheepdog would have pleased me no end.
This can be seen most easily when Mrs. Coulter and Lyra walk out to the airship and pick up their luggage.
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And now I'm almost done rereading the book and I'm just really surprised at all the minor little details they changed for apparently no reason, and all the cool stuff they left out. Are there any interviews or articles out there where the movie makers talk about why they adapted it the way they did? i.e., terribly?
And as to the question above, I would say that LOTR is superior in pretty much every aspect, but that doesn't mean HDM isn't terrific itself.
Considering that this one is getting pretty bad reviews, I doubt it. Normally being a shitty movie doesn't remove all chance of a sequel, but this little trilogy is going to have a pretty hefty SFX budget one way or the other so I doubt it would be seen as a safe investment.
But did it make money? That's the real question.
Even for its time. It came out in 1954. That's several decades after the Wizard of Oz, which I feel is less deep but more creative.
I also have serious problems with the black-and-white moral universe of Lord of the Rings, where cutting down thousands of disfigured animalistic enemy troops is the epitome of heroism. Yes, I understand they were mostly Orcs, but Tolkien's style is drawn heavily from medieval epics that celebrate mass killings of rival tribes and religions. The Catholic overtones in LoTR also piss me off.
I think Tolkien's major achievement was crafting a huge fantasy world with a detailed and cohesive history that extends off from the pages of the story. He probably took his fantasy world more seriously than any other author. But I'm not convinced that necessarily makes for better literature.
The budget was 180 million and the revenue so far is 257 million dollars as of January 3rd, 2008. The DVD release should earn it some more money.