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Golden Compass - biased movie review/rant aaaarrgh
Date: 2007/12/28 05:07	By: BravoLima	Status:

Before turning into a half-baked Lord of the Rings wannabe in just about every single way imaginable, Golden Compass started off like a nice little children's story. Scary witches in the background of people's minds, silly little creatures that followed people around like the annoying guy at party's with bad teeth, and a sweet little girl... wait... no, she wasn't sweet... she almost wasn't a girl. She was the 21st century spoilt-looking little madam, Germaine Greer would be cheering from her grave... if my plan went accordingly...but I digress.

VISUALS

Visuals were generally stunning as far as the Computer Graphics in the movie went. No matter how rediculous it looked to see a polar bear holding a calm and polite conversation with a preteen princess wannabe. One exceptions. The flying witches. Never before have I seen people flying done well with CG animation... and I still haven't. They looked like some live animation figures from a Monthy Python sketch and moved like the car in the old Chitty Chitty Bang Bang movie.

There was a LOT of fake things, due to these numerous and pesky daemons.

PERFORMANCES

Functional, to put it mildly. Well the kid's no prodigy actress, but she holds her own better than I would if prostituted to movie-makers infront of millions. The computer animated characters were computer animated characters, and behaved accordingly. They acted like a cartoonists wet dream, doing the usual things that most likely looked cool to animators.

This movie suffers the same illness as Lord of the Rings did when it was made into a movie. An epic and brilliant tale shoved into a palatable pill that the masses could swallow with ease, but it lost a heck of a lot of nutrients along the way. A lot of the time you'll be trying to figure out what's probably happened inbetween the scenes, and if you're paying attention you might just laugh once or twice at the speed of a certain polar bear king's recovery.

CHARACTERS

Subpar, whinging British alley kids, most of them anyway. Then an 'aeronaut', whom I assume flunked astronaut school, probably for trying to be too much like an American cowboy when everyone else were speaking either with charming upper class Hugh Grant British accents or harsh Cockney dialects. Given that there were some atrocities done to these kids, I really couldn't give a crap, because they were so fictitious and shallow that I'd much sooner use sand paper as toilet roll than actually want to see these kids saved. A fair few of the characters in the movie are CG animated, and therefore inferior. They're not actors, they're complicated ventriloquist's dummies and we're all pretending we can't see the guy's arm shoved deep up the doll's butt.

STORY

/Initiating vent diagnostic procedures

This would have to be where this ambitious, obviously high budgeted movie craps in it's own hat and eats it. If it followed the story of the book, and I say if as I've not read the book, as in my school we were taught to burn books, then that would have been their first mistake.

The creator of this 'world' is obviously none other than an imbred miscreate that still requires nourishment from his mother's teet at the age of 32 and frequently soils himself because he enjoys the smell. There is not one original concept in the movie that hasn't been borrowed from some area of real life or other, better, movies or books.

For example, if the Golden Compass itself was small enough to fit on one's finger it would simply be dubbed 'The Ring'. Nicole Kidman was a Gollum whom most would much rather 'tap that'. All the major characters associated with the main protagonists were just regurgitates from LOTR, just done much worse... heck, our protagonist even has a Sam Gamgee at the end.

The enemies were the worst of all. There are clearly only three types of 'bad guy' in this 'complex' world the author has created for us. There are eskimos with camouflaged hunting rifles. There are also peasant Russian guards, that speak a made up gibberish resembling some of the sound of Russian. However, like most stories that take languages associated with 'evil' to the common Westerner's ear (aka mine), they put a twist on it to make it sound more harsh and 'evil' than what Russian actually sounds like.

There are also Nazis. You'll have to look past their disguises. They should be packing mp5s and granadas, however they look like they ransacked a feudal aged Samurai village and plundered some of their wares. They have Samurai 'inspired' armour (apart from the dinky hats), and katanas, when just about everyone else has a gun. To make matters worse, these cannon fodders speak in a language quite similar to the other aforementioned Russian spin-off language, this time however resembling something more like German. That's right, the 'other' evil language.

In this movie, you'll also be amazed that the Nazis have an Aushwitz, set up complete with testing laboratories for experiments on those useless Jews... well, in this case kids. There is also a Magisterium, which is basically what movie producers call something when they're too shit-scared to call a Church a Church. The Magisterium has a set up mirroring the Church's structure and heirarchy. And with their evil ideals of controlling the people for their own good, one doesn't need explanation to the parallels.

CONCLUSION
The movie's conclusion, not mine.

It's clear it's set up for a series of some length. In fact, it's utterly contrived and patheticly done that the protagonist literally reads out a 'to do' list that we can all assume will be included in the next installments, if they bother to make them, if people bother spending money to watch this excuse of a movie. If they ever want to run an advertisment for the next few movies, they could just have that dialogue of the last few minutes, and I have a horrible feeling they probably will.

My conclusion.

Well, with LOTR and Harry Potter being such a huge success, one must expect a follow of absent-minded movie producers looking for an easy buck. We've seen Eragon, now we've witnessed this horror, and there will be more to come. A whole lot of money spent on something that I'm sure some Useful Idiot at the top of the movie making food chain thought would create some easy cash flow.

See it if you have a similar disturbed sense of humour as I do and you want a bit of a laugh.

You should always respect one's religious beliefs, however imaginary friends, delusional behaviour, a belief in a two thousand year old folk-lore should be treated by a professional.