The Golden Compass (2007)

The Golden Compass may well be one of the most controversial family films of all time. Based on the novel “Northern Lights”, the first of author Philip Pullmans “His Dark Materials Trilogy”, it is a children’ fantasy of the Lewis/ Tolken variety, save that instead of a vaugley defined Christianity, the philosophical underpinnings of both the author and the story are atheistic. In fact author Pullman would hate the comparisons to Lewis, in an interview with Newsweek magazine some months ago he denounced the venerated Christian author and apologist, and accused his beloved Narina books of being vile and unfit for children. These accusations will surely cause a degree of recoil from Lewis’s fan, but that is not to say that Pullman isn’t worth listing to.

Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert awarded the film four out of four stars and called it "a darker, deeper fantasy epic than the Rings trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia or the Potter films," saying that it "creates villains that are more complex and poses more intriguing questions. As a visual experience, it is superb. As an escapist fantasy, it is challenging [...] I think [it] is a wonderfully good-looking movie, with exciting passages and a captivating heroine." (Wikipedia)

Indeed Golden Compass excels as pure fantasy escapist fun. I found myself enthralled by the film, it has all the right elements for the iconic children’s parable, charismatic lead, likable ensemble cast, beautiful vista’s, fantastic special effects, epic battles and a youthful sense of wonder and possibility. When you see young Lyra bouncing about the arctic waists on a talking polar bear king, well that’s just awesome, makes one feel like a child and how can you not love that.

I suppose however that is the problem so many have with the film, and by extension the book series from which it was derived (much as with the Potter series). It’s quite compelling and geared to children and hence has great potential to have an influence on their thinking. I will side step the arguments about the books themselves however and focus on the movie itself. Regardless of how much criticism the film has gotten from conservative Christians on account of its source material, its gotten even more from the atheist and secularist community for toning down from that same source material.

To succeed as a family film in America you can’t be overtly anti-religious. Thusly if you didn’t know to look for the controversy in this movie, you might not even see it. In Pullmans book the evil organization that rules over Lyria’s parallel Earth is called the Magisterium, and it is a stand in for the Roman Catholic Church, though in more of a Fascist/medieval forum then the current institution. In the movie the term Magisterium stays but its exact nature is more amorphius. You can recognize a Pope figure, the dogmatism, and oddly named managerial bodies, but the name of God is never evoked, and in the movie the Magisterium mostly just occupies the same role ‘The Empire’ would in a Star Wars film.

If the movie teaches children anything directly its not to trust everything adults tell them. This is true, and children should learn this, I’d say the only real point of discussion on the matter should be how far you take that, and in that area Compass offers as many examples of good and honest adults as it does bad and secretive ones. Frankly if you let your young children see Happy Feet, I can’t see philosophically why you wouldn’t let slightly older ones see this movie (though that evil polar bear getting his jaw torn off is kind of shocking). I liked it, it’s as good of a liberal children fantasy film as your ever likely to see.