The Golden Compass

Viewed: Theater

The trailer for The Golden Compass looked interesting, and I read one review that gave it a good rating. I probably should have read more reviews. It wasn’t a bad movie; it just was “meh.”

I had read and heard about groups boycotting and denouncing the movie as anti-religion (anti-Catholicism, specifically). Groups were saying that the movie director was trying to brainwash children against religion. For some reason, I found this intriguing — bad movies usually won’t get people up in arms for or against it, for any reason. It seems that most every fantasy movie gets this accusation, despite most (all?) of them having no comment at all on religion.

After hearing about the complaints, I learned that the original book was, per the author’s own admission, vehemently anti-religion. Hmm. So maybe the groups were right. The author is on record having said some pretty strong things against religion, and he apparently used his books to “spread the word,” so to speak.

I haven’t read the book, but I have now seen the movie. I saw nothing at all in the movie that could be considered anti-religion. Maybe the book rants on against religion. Maybe the author is a rabid atheist. Whatever. The movie is pretty religion-neutral.

The settings are beautiful, the acting is good, and the writing is at least decent. But the pacing of the movie is just . . . off. Until near the end, the only scenes of the bad guys seemed thrown in, not really well placed. The concept of “dust” comes across too vague; is it a good thing or a bad thing?

The whole ice bears thing feels odd, and it comes and goes so fast that I wonder if they could have just skipped that whole part and just left the kingdom concept as backdrop. What happens in the kingdom could have been completely left out and the story would not have changed at all.

And finally, the single most puzzling thing to me was why they pronounced “daemon” as “demon.” The word “demon” has such strong negative connotations — evil beasts from Hell. But the daemons in the movie were the personification of each person’s soul, in animal form. Had they just pronounced the word more like it is spelled, “daymon,” it wouldn’t have been so jarring. As someone who daily works with words to convey understanding, it bothered me that they repeatedly used a word sound that brings to mind the exact opposite of what the meaning is supposed to be.

As often as Hollywood screenwriters completely change stories taken from books, why couldn’t they have changed this one name/word? Most people don’t know the classical definition of daemon, and so they’ll naturally apply a more recent definition to the word. And that could draw the outrage of some religious groups. And it has.

There’s nothing to see at the end of the credits.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com