FIVE minutes before “The Golden Compass” started, I was wondering when it was going to start. Forty minutes into it, I was wondering exactly the same thing.
“The Golden Compass,” a sort of “The Empire Strikes Harry Potter of the Caribbean,” only with giant polar bears wearing suits of armor and punching each other in the face, reminded me why I stopped reading sci-fi and fantasy when I was 15. It was the nouns. “Hark thee, my fair Stenerud, and wield well this ancient benirschke. Journeyest then to the plain of Septien, and unleash these yepremians with the longbow of
Herrera . . . ”
The best noun in a movie that gives you more of them than an SAT prep course is this one: Coulter. It’s the
name of the ice-hearted blonde, played by Nicole Kidman, who is a powerful advocate for an evil organization bent on bringing dark times to the universe. How tickled is Ann C.? She’s probably adjusting her pointy black hat and zooming off to see the movie on her broomstick, giggling through the night skies.
Mrs. Coulter is trying to corrupt Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), an innocent girl at a magical school in a parallel universe where everyone has a different variety of pet, or “daemon,” that acts as a guardian angel, soul brother and concierge. The only character in the movie I remotely cared about was Lyra’s daemon, who is alternately a talking ermine or bird or cat who is forever taking a beating from nastier creatures and looks awfully cute doing so.
The girl, whose uncle, the stalwart Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), has been targeted for elimination by the sinister ruling priests of the Vatican-like Magisterium, has an aletheiometer, or golden compass, that promises unlimited knowledge to anyone who can figure out how to read its strange symbols. Lord Asriel goes off to the frozen north to search out a substance called Dust that brings free thinking to those it reaches and so poses a major threat to the rule of the Magisterium, whose Dust-busting force from the General Oblation Board – the Gobblers – is trying to keep the Dust from liberating Lyra and the other kids.
So goes the back story. And the front story, as scene after scene brings new characters dropping in to explain the increasingly tedious details behind all this. Oh, the Belaquas and the Bolvangars. The Gyptians. The intercission experiment.
Sorting all this out yields a clanking allegory (Church bad; secular skepticism good) that sucks all the fun away while much more enticing-looking stuff – fanciful zeppelin docks and mysterious pirate ships – hovers frustratingly in the background, like Christmas toys that go unused while toddlers play with the empty box. Worse, it’s like toddlers ignoring the toys because they’re frowning over Nietzsche and sighing about the will to power and the ascetic ideal.
Every 10 minutes or so, the movie remembers it’s supposed to show us actual things happening, so it throws in a half-hearted 30-second action scene (say, Lyra being pestered by robot bugs or having to cross an icy gorge). Things pick up a little when, in the second hour, Lyra finds an ally in a fierce, enslaved polar bear (voiced by Ian McKellen), but he too reels off a few pages of grudges and legends. They say you’d pay good money to hear an actor like McKellen read the phone book. How about the Dungeons and Dragons manual?
Long after I’d lost interest, or rather failed to locate any, there came to pass two expensive-looking but uninvolving action scenes. One is a ho-hum battle near the end – the bad guys are Cossack-looking fellows who speak something that sounds like Russian, requiring us to drag our eyes across subtitles that say things like, “Stop the children, they cannot escape!”
There’s also that strange biting/boxing match between McKellen’s good bear and an evil one. It ends without a lot more thrills than you’d expect in a bout between, say Naomi Campbell and her maid.
The film is not as silly as it sounds; it’s much sillier. Remember the worst line in “Star Wars”? “But I was gonna go to the Tashi station to pick up some power converters!” Imagine a whole movie like that.
Writer-director Chris Weitz, who did nicely with a simple story in adapting “About a Boy,” has been swamped by the task of condensing a densely imaginative 430-page book. It’s as if, given the task of setting up a display of animals that would fit in his living room, he went to the city zoo and cut off a 6-inch portion of every beast, then tossed the bloody chunks in a pile. The best you can say about “The Golden Compass” is that it’s merely the second-dullest Nicole Kidman/Daniel Craig film this year.
THE GOLDEN COMPASS
Chronicles of Yawnia.
Running time: 114 minutes. Rated PG-13 (action violence). At the Lincoln Square, the Union Square, the Kips Bay, others.