Severe Jam Damage

I was going to title this entry ‘Northern Lights’ in defiance of the renaming of the book for the Yanks - but having seen the movie I’m leaving it as ‘The Golden Compass’ so that it cannot be mistaken for the book.
Which may give you an idea of what I thought of the movie…

Not that I completely hated it - exactly. It was more of a sense of ‘Ohmygawdthatscoolwaitwhataretheydoingandwhyisthathappeningandstopitstopit!’

But I get ahead of myself.

Firstly the cast is excellent - a more A-list bunch of (mainly) British thesps you could hardly hope to see outside of LoTR or the Harry Potter franchise. Unfortunately the cast is wasted. The plot, the script, the EXPOSITION - oh my GOD the exposition.
‘Now Lyra, as you very well know we all live in parallel universes and in THIS one we wear our souls outside our bodies and we call them daemons.’
Not an exact quote from Derek Jacobi, but close bloody enough.
There were bits I loved. London from the airship - the perpetual motion machines on the carriages - the steampunkness of it all - Nicole Kidman perfectly cast as the cold Mrs Coulter - Lyra’s grubby face and defiant fear-nothing attitude, a pretty damn good heroine for young girls to aspire to - The Gyptians ships - and the exhilaration of seeing the plot points in the book right up there on the screen.
Trouble was, it was all so rushed. The movie comes in at just under 2 hours. It should be at least three. Lyra bounced from Oxford to London to Svarbald and her encounters with other characters - which in the books slowly opened her universe to the reader - became laughably coincidental in the movie. She gets chased through the streets of London and the Gyptians just happen to jump out and save her. Oh, have I mentioned the constant exposition? The Goth - who deigned to join our outing - opined that there was probably too much for someone who had read the books but not quite enough for him (who hadn’t) to make any sense of it. In addition the ending SUCKED - if they do get the funding for the next two books I have no idea how they are going to clean up the mess they’ve left. The Gin Lady wholly approved of the knitwear - but that was about the only nice thing she had to say that evening.
Overall one thumb down and one somewhere in the middle for the sake of the sterling cast - wholly underused and wasted in a film that could have been just as amazing as the book - if Chris Weitz - who I have just found out was responsible for the script of ‘Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps’ - had given the scriptwriting duties to someone else.