i've been to the movies twice since i came to germany. there is a cinema in mannheim that plays american and english movies in their original language and on my first trip i went and saw beowulf. not the most exciting movie. it left me with a feeling of indifference and a need to watch 300, what i feel is a far superior movie. on the second outing i went and saw the golden compass (IMDB page) and official website here for the trailer and other nonsense. now what has me blogging about the golden compass is the fact that so many people have criticised the movie, started calling for boycotts and everything else this side of a public lynching before it even came out. i have seen it and i am going to tell you, do not go and see it. not because all of the press (good and bad), not because it has received some good reviews, not because of the perceived anti-christian plot, but simply because it just isn't that good of a movie and if you're in australia movies are too expensive to see out of curiosity. i left the cinema piised off, more so than when i saw beowulf, and i actually didn't mind beowulf that much. (i just wished it wasn't so obviously animated and strategic in its hiding of rude bits. if you have the guts to have the titular hero and jolie naked, then have the guts to not put candles, forearms and ideally placed gold bits in the way zemeckis!)
the golden compass is like a swag of other movies to come out recently (eragon, the dark is rising etc) which all come from children's novels and hope to cash in on that harry potter money now the books have come to an end. sadly, it seems that some of these books would have worked quite well as movies if they had just left in all the darker parts of the stories and not treated them to the infamous 'hollywood' treatment. not everything is suppose to be light and fluffy and not everything is morally black and white (something which the last two harry potters had better be wary of, cause they go into some dark territory before the end). the golden compass however, hints at something darker, but never quite explains it.
***SPOILERS FROM NOW ON***
the plot revolves around children being kidnapped and an apparently evil woman who will stop at nothing to keep the church in power. i will not go into specifics about things as i don't remember some of it (it was that exciting) and i don't really care enough about this movie. i just want you to know the general gist so you can understand my feelings of indifference. now in this imagined world people's souls aren't inside them, but are personified by animals (daemons) that co-exist with their human counterparts. now as a child, your daemon doesn't have a specific animal, it morphs between animals until you get older and then it becomes a single being. this is all well and good, but the only child whose daemon morphs is the main characters. i guess she's about 10-12. her friend's and other children all seem a lot younger than her, but their daemons are constantly one animal. point why the movie shitted me number one. it's made abundantly clear that she needs to grow up and they know she hasn't because her daemon changes. so what about the 5 year old she was playing with at the start? is he all grown up? is he an adult, while a girl twice his age is still a child?
the main girl i found irritating. i'm not saying she's a bad actress, hardly, she's still a girl and we'll have to wait until she's much older to determine this, but what i am saying is that as a main character i found her annoying. she seemed to act like what a child would think an adult would want a child to act like. (if you follow me) there was no depth, no emotion and no nothing to it. it was like that kid from AI turned female and decided to act again. sure she cried when needed, sure she looked kinda angry when needed, but it all seemed fake. like that kid who gets what he wants by pulling out the crocodile tears. not all the acting was bad, nicole kidman and daniel craig were excellent in their parts. although craig didn't have much of one. everyone else on this movie tended to phone it in. it was like they all thought, 'this is a fantasy/special effects movie, no one will notice if we do nothing here, they'll just keep watching the polar bear talk.' point two - why say yes to act in a movie if you wont actually act? i'm looking at you sam elliot and eva green.
but then again, how could one act when most of the plot is never explained, or if it is, it's quite simple and really goes nowhere anyway? which brings me to point number three. if this was a book, then shouldn't there be more plot? or if there isn't more plot, shouldn't things be a little easier to expand and deepen? or even to patch up plot holes or inconsistencies? for example, when kidman's character tells the main one, 'i am your mother,' why the bloody hell doesn't she check with the damn compass to see if she's lying? the character is evil! what you think she wouldn't lie? she's in league with the kiddie kidnappers!!! or how about explaining why kidman's daemon doesn't talk when every other character's does? how about explaining why when a child is separated from their daemon they don't die? if you set up the premise that what the daemon feels physically so does the person, and vice versa, then when you rip that child from its daemon shouldn't they be dead? not just sitting in a shed freezing their tits off saying, 'i'm cold. where's my rat?'
now point number four, there's a major plot point about witches going to war. the main character stands in the middle of an ice-desert and looks up to see all these witches flying in the sky. some character then states they are going to war. what freakin' war? in the big climax of the movie the kidnapped children are set free and the kidnappers and the gypsies have a mass brawl that the witches come down to help with. is this the war they're going to? cause it looked more like a scuffle than a war. maybe even a rumble if i wanted to be nice. and why, if this is indeed the war, does it take them so long to bloody get there? the main characters are travelling by polar bear and walking, and yet if you fly it takes you longer. did they stop for gingerbread on the way?
look i could go on and on about the terribleness of this movie, but i'll stop here. it's a shame it was bad, i was hoping for something good to come out of this movie, but alas, it looks like i'll have to what till next november for harry potter and the half-blood prince to come out. (zombies in a 'kids' movie! YAY!!!) i'll leave you with the words of a friend who saw the golden compass with me. after seeing the final moments of the film, where the main character turns to her friend and says in the most obvious cliffhangery (i think i just made a new word) mood, 'but there's still so much to do...' begin swelling music... he said, 'i have to come back in a year to continue watching? i don't fucking think so.'
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