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19/12/2007 THE GOLDEN COMPASS Okay babeluvers, we’ll cut to the chase here. Nicole Kidman looks wonderful. She acts wonderfully too in what is a brilliant cast that you’ll be delighted to know also includes James Bond Daniel Craig and his Casino Royale co-star, the vampirish French siren Eva Green playing a witch! There will doubtless be a few offers to share her broomstick home. Add in the voices of Ian McKellen (in the part of an armoured bear!) and Ian McShane (as the bear king!) plus other assorted movie legends like Christopher Lee, Derek Jakobi, Tom Courtenay, Kristen Scott Thomas and Jack Shepherd under the direction of Chris Weitz and you have a very tasty and classy act. Can all that talent (not to mention all those egoes) combine to create more than the sum of their considerable parts and give us the blockbuster and holiday box office the makers clearly desperately hope they have? It has, after all, been a troubled production that’s been over five years in the making with various casualties on the way (screenwriter Tom Stoppard for one while director Weitz resigned at one point but was re-hired a year later after things didn’t work out with his successor Anand Tucker. Then there’s the difficulty of all the technical wizardry required to make it all work with an overload of computer graphics and an overall style that recalls both Lord Of The Rings and Star Wars. The bottom line is The Golden Compass sets itself targets it doesn’t have a hope in hell of living up to. It would require several boybands dancing on my lap, someone feeding me grapes and fireworks exploding all around to match my expectations for this movie and while I managed the boyband bit, the earth didn’t move in the way I wanted it to. But is it any good? Yes, of course it is – it’s hugely entertaining, it’s just not the fantasmagorical wow mega-movie everyone wants it to be. Based on the Philip Pullman novel Northern Lights (itself part of a trilogy called His Dark Materials), it tells of an orphan girl called Lyra (a cute performance by unknown 13-year-old Londoner Dakota Blue Richards – great name!) as an orphan girl living in a parallel universe. This parallel universe is a dodgy place run by a bunch of horrendous characters and when Lyra’s friend is kidnapped, she embarks on an epic and highly dangerous journey north to try and rescue him. The special effects in this strange universe in which Lyra finds herself are truly amazing and the movie has already upset some people who see it as an attack on religion (the Magisterium, which runs a dictatorship in the parallel universe, is a thin disguise for the Catholic church) and the rule of law. Then again there’s always people who will complain about ANYTHING. Not that we need to worry ourselves unduly about such dark interpretations. At the very least it’s an escapist adventure and a pretty decent one, too, with Daniel Craig again marking his territory as the coolest man on the planet as Lyra’s weirdly scary uncle and Nicole Kidman destined to give a lot of us nightmares with her deliciously fiendish performance as the beautiful baddie. There’ll be an Oscar in this for Nicole, I’ll be bound. A good film rather than a great one, but it’ll still clean up over the holiday period and if you don’t like it, tough – there’s two sequels on the way! |
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