The Golden Compass seems to be a missed opportunity of a movie. The film company were obviously hoping to start a new fantasy franchise like LoTR and Harry Potter without showing any real understanding of how they worked. While the acting quality was almost uniformly high (unlike Harry Potter) the story telling was disjointed and uninvolving and the script almost painfully bad in places. It appears that the makers looked at the spectacular special effects of LoTR, in particular, and forgot that what made that series work was not the visuals (although they were necessary to tell the story) but the characters and story, which everything else was intended to serve. Here the story is made to serve the effects rather than the other way around.
The striving to be LoTR is particularly noticeable in the casting of Ian McKellan and Christopher Lee. However the movie did not do either actor any favours, with Lee having only one line and McKellan delivering lines that looked like a parody of his role as Gandalf. When the bear played by McKellan yells to the heroine to run on from a thin crumbling bridge that he cannot cross, my whole family burst into laughter - which did not seem to be the effect striven for.
The CGI was mostly of a high quality, but was uneven in places, with McKellan's character again being poorly served, moving from realistic to cartoonish and back again several times.
I am sure that the series by Philip Pullman could have made a good series of movies, but this was not the script or director to launch one.
The striving to be LoTR is particularly noticeable in the casting of Ian McKellan and Christopher Lee. However the movie did not do either actor any favours, with Lee having only one line and McKellan delivering lines that looked like a parody of his role as Gandalf. When the bear played by McKellan yells to the heroine to run on from a thin crumbling bridge that he cannot cross, my whole family burst into laughter - which did not seem to be the effect striven for.
The CGI was mostly of a high quality, but was uneven in places, with McKellan's character again being poorly served, moving from realistic to cartoonish and back again several times.
I am sure that the series by Philip Pullman could have made a good series of movies, but this was not the script or director to launch one.
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