The film's 12-year-old heroine, the orphan Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), is being cared for by the Master of Jordan College, a liberal institution, while her uncle, the scientist-explorer Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), travels the globe establishing beneficial contact with other universes. This is a parallel universe with electric light but no phones or cars, elegant scientific instruments out of paintings by Wright of Derby, and where the principal means of communication are forms of telepathy, eccentric boats and flying machines seemingly designed by Jules Verne and Heath Robinson. Before it moves to Norway and chilly points north, the film begins in a warm, romantic, mythical Oxford (Pullman studied at the same college as Tolkien, and there's a brief, beautiful shot of Exeter's quadrangle and its Sainte Chapelle-style chapel) some time between the late 19th century and 1930.

Indeed, for nearly 50 years I've owned a handsome 946-page edition of the Norwegian Nobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter but after numerous attempts have never got beyond the opening paragraph that begins: 'When the lands and goods of Ivar Gjesling the younger, of Sundbu, were divided after his death in 1306, his lands in Sil of Gudbrandsdal fell to his daughter Ragnfrid and her husband Bjorgulfson.'Īll this came back to me when seeing The Golden Compass, adapted from Pullman's Northern Lights by the film's American director Chris Weitz, who has progressed from the junk food of American Pie through the plain English cuisine of Nick Hornby's About a Boy to the Oxbridge high table fare of His Dark Materials. Instead, it’s a synthetic, flavourless product that lacks the subversive tang of Pullman’s source novel.But then I've always have trouble with books about characters called Thrombosis and Paedophile seeking the Crystal Chrestomathy in the land of Pancreatitis. As with the scary Mrs Coulter, the film should possess, 'a scent of grown-upness, something disturbing and enticing at the same time.' But like the Northern Lights themselves, glimpsed only briefly as a projected image, all this is missing. In the book, we see everything from Lyra’s point-of-view, sharing her sense of wonder, her doubts and fears, her love for her shape-shifting daemon Pantalaimon. What’s missing is any sense of Lyra’s exhilarating but perplexing journey from childhood innocence to incipient adulthood. Here, with the help of Lord Faa’s good-hearted Gyptians, ferocious ice bear Iorek Byrnison (badly voiced by a miscast Ian McKellen), cowboy aeronaut Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott), witch queen Serafina Pekkala (Eva Green) and a precious truth-telling instrument called an alethiometer, she confronts her enemies: the corrupt king of the ice bears, Ragnar Sturlusson (Ian McShane), the cruel Mrs Coulter (Kidman typecast as an ice queen) and hordes of Tartar henchmen. Lyra’s epic quest takes her to the frozen wastes of the Arctic Circle. While zeppelins float above an alternate Oxford’s dreaming spires, wilful 12-year-old orphan Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards) swears to rescue her kitchen-boy friend Roger from his child-cutter abductors. The skeleton of the plot remains, albeit in a compacted, confusing form. Just as the church-like Magisterium and the glacially glamorous Mrs Coulter (Nicole Kidman) are rumoured to be severing pre-pubescent children from their animal daemons (an external ‘familiar’ representing their inner soul), so this clinical dissection of Pullman’s vividly imagined parallel world cuts away the warm flesh and leaves only the bare bones. Bland, bloodless and bereft of magic, New Line’s corporate sanitisation of Philip Pullman’s exciting, provocative fantasy novel, ‘The Northern Lights’, strips the book of its humanity and soul.

Golden compass 2 film