The Golden Compass is made of AWESOME
Dec. 11th, 2007 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
velessaJust got back from finally seeing The Golden Compass. All I can say is it was FANTASTIC. This trilogy is bound to be my Star Wars or Lord of the Rings.
They managed to do a truly amazing job adapting it from the book; I was really, really impressed. This is probably the best book-to-movie I've ever seen. Pretty much everything important was in there, the things they changed and/or left out were insignificant, and I could easily understand why they changed the things they did. It did not piss me off the way book adaptations usually do, at all.
Like most movie adaptations of books, I was afraid they were going to totally butcher it and get all kinds of things wrong or leave out all kinds of important things. Plus there's everything I've heard about purists being mad that they removed too much of the Church-bashing to appease a wider audience, but I didn't see this at all. There are more than ample references to the "Magesterium" and how they tell people what to think and how they fear free will/thought and any authority other than their own. There's really nothing subtle about it, so I don't see where the book purists are getting the idea that it's been toned down too much. And as an agnostic I obviously don't care what religious folk think of it. I think that part of it they got just right.
What I'm not sure of is why they switched the order of two major scenes in the book, and I wish they had told the story of Iorek's banishment better. Those are about my only big complaints, though. That and the guy playing Lord Asriel needs to be meaner; he didn't strike fear into me the way he should. On the other hand, Ian McKellan did a better job than I expected as Iorek (he's so not at all how I imagined his voice), and Nicole Kidman is absolutely *perfect* as Mrs. Coulter. Lee Scoresby and Hester are totally perfect as well, exactly as I imagined them!
All in all this movied gets a huge THUMBS UP! from me. I can't wait to see the next one!
They managed to do a truly amazing job adapting it from the book; I was really, really impressed. This is probably the best book-to-movie I've ever seen. Pretty much everything important was in there, the things they changed and/or left out were insignificant, and I could easily understand why they changed the things they did. It did not piss me off the way book adaptations usually do, at all.
Like most movie adaptations of books, I was afraid they were going to totally butcher it and get all kinds of things wrong or leave out all kinds of important things. Plus there's everything I've heard about purists being mad that they removed too much of the Church-bashing to appease a wider audience, but I didn't see this at all. There are more than ample references to the "Magesterium" and how they tell people what to think and how they fear free will/thought and any authority other than their own. There's really nothing subtle about it, so I don't see where the book purists are getting the idea that it's been toned down too much. And as an agnostic I obviously don't care what religious folk think of it. I think that part of it they got just right.
What I'm not sure of is why they switched the order of two major scenes in the book, and I wish they had told the story of Iorek's banishment better. Those are about my only big complaints, though. That and the guy playing Lord Asriel needs to be meaner; he didn't strike fear into me the way he should. On the other hand, Ian McKellan did a better job than I expected as Iorek (he's so not at all how I imagined his voice), and Nicole Kidman is absolutely *perfect* as Mrs. Coulter. Lee Scoresby and Hester are totally perfect as well, exactly as I imagined them!
All in all this movied gets a huge THUMBS UP! from me. I can't wait to see the next one!
