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<\/a>\u201cThat\u2019s some pretty fast work, Miss Lyra.\u201d So says an impressed Texan aeronaut to a young English girl after she befriends a depressed talking polar bear, inspires the bear to strike back against some church-based bad guys, and persuades the bear to join her on a quest \u2014 all, seemingly, in a matter of minutes. But the aeronaut could just as easily be talking about The Golden Compass<\/a><\/i>, the film in which all these characters appear.<\/p>\nIn an age when big-budget movies based on British fantasies tend to run a little long \u2014 the first Narnia<\/a> movie and most of the Harry Potter<\/a> films run about two and a half hours, and each of the Lord of the Rings<\/a><\/i> films famously clocked in at more than three \u2014 this new film, based on the first book of Philip Pullman\u2019s sprawling, controversial His Dark Materials trilogy<\/a>, manages to wrap things up in less than two hours, and it feels rather rushed as a result.<\/p>\n There is spectacle aplenty here, to be sure. Fans of the book \u2014 including those who disagree with the trilogy\u2019s anti-religious thrust but enjoy Pullman\u2019s obvious skills as a writer \u2014 will find much to enjoy. For the most part, the actors are perfectly cast in their roles, and the special effects are dazzlingly complex and rendered with just the right, casual touch, especially where the talking animals are concerned.<\/p>\n Some of the talking animals, namely the polar bears, are just that: animals that talk. But many of them are \u201cdaemons,\u201d or external manifestations of a human being\u2019s soul. In the parallel universe where The Golden Compass<\/i> takes place, every person has a daemon, and the daemons of children are constantly shifting shape, from one animal to another; but when these children hit puberty, their daemons settle into one character-defining form for the rest of their lives. (The servants tend to have daemons shaped like dogs, while the villains tend to have daemons shaped like insects and reptiles.)<\/p>\n Against all odds, the film succeeds in creating an environment where the appearance of these animals everywhere is taken for granted, and where the constant shape-shifting by the younger ones seems perfectly natural. But the film is so busy zipping from one plot point to the next that you never quite develop a feel for the relationship<\/i> that exists between any individual human and his or her daemon. The film gets the mechanics<\/i> of human-daemon relationships right, but, ironically, it doesn\u2019t quite get the soul<\/i>.<\/p>\n The movie\u2019s accelerated pace gives short shrift to many other story elements, too.<\/p>\n The story revolves around Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards), a pre-teen who has been raised as an orphan in an Oxford college under the sponsorship of her \u201cuncle,\u201d an adventurous scientist named Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig). Shortly after the film begins, Lyra is taken under the wing of Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman), a beautiful but, we soon discover, cruel agent of the Magisterium, the church-like organization that dominates their world. (Lord Asriel\u2019s daemon is a snow leopard; Mrs. Coulter\u2019s, a golden monkey that looks kind of glamorous but isn\u2019t afraid to use its claws.)<\/p>\n At one point, the master of the college gives Lyra an alethiometer \u2014 a compass-shaped device that reveals the truth to anyone who can interpret its symbols. No one knows how to read it, not even Lyra at first. But then, several scenes later, she tries again, and this time she can<\/i> read it. Where did her seemingly supernatural talent come from? And where is her sense of discovery, on learning that she has this talent? The film barely has time to even think of such questions, because it is too busy using her skill to move on to the next scene, and the one after that.<\/p>\n Then there are the bears. An entire culture is hinted at in this film, and the bear we get to know best \u2014 a disgraced member of ursine royalty named Iorek Byrnison (whose growly voice is provided by Ian McKellen) \u2014 has a personal story of defeat, shame and revival that would sustain an entire Rocky<\/i> movie. But again, the film devotes only a few perfunctory scenes to this subplot, and then it\u2019s off to the next thing. The climactic fight between Iorek and a usurper named Ragnar Sturlusson (voice of Ian McShane) certainly looks<\/i> kind of cool, but the film simply does not give us time to savour the moment, or to experience the significance of this battle for both Iorek\u2019s personal honor and the fate of the bear kingdom as a whole.<\/p>\n It might be unfair to compare and contrast this film with Peter Jackson\u2019s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, but, well, New Line Cinema, the studio behind both films, has been making those connections in its own ads for some time now. (The fact that McKellen, who once played Gandalf, now appears as a mentor of sorts to Lyra, while Christopher Lee, who once played Saruman, has a cameo as one of the new film\u2019s Magisterial villains, also cannot help but bring the LOTR films to mind.)<\/p>\n So it is worth pointing out that Lyra goes on a journey of rescue and discovery that is not entirely unlike Frodo\u2019s, and she encounters a variety of places, people, and exotic cultures, just as Frodo did\u0097but whereas Jackson let us bask in these new discoveries, writer-director Chris Weitz (making his first solo film after co-directing American Pie<\/a><\/i> and About a Boy<\/a><\/i> with his brother Paul) shows little interest in such things. Jackson created a world<\/i>, but Weitz settles for setpieces.<\/p>\n The film races Lyra from one bit of jeopardy to the next, and she is usually bailed out by help that neither she nor we ever saw coming. At first this feels like a mere screenwriting cheat; when rescuers appear out of nowhere in one early scene and tell Lyra that they have been following her for days, you nod along even as you wonder why they didn\u2019t help her slightly sooner, when it would have been less dramatic.<\/p>\n But by the end, Weitz is staging these scenes in ways that simply defy logic. A wide shot shows two groups of people, lined up against each other on a wide open field of ice and snow, with Lyra and the leader of the other group standing opposite each other in the middle. A handful of closer shots show the leader of the other group preparing to attack Lyra. And then, out of nowhere, someone arrives to save Lyra, and he\u2019s standing right there<\/i> and it\u2019s meant to be a surprise even though you\u2019d think his approach might have been noticed by someone<\/i> on either side of the battle.<\/p>\n Also noteworthy is how the new film begins with a bit of narration by a witch named Serafina Pekkala (Eva Green), which serves a function similar to that of the narration provided by the elf-queen Galadriel at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings<\/i>. Both of these characters are centuries old and can sense that a war is brewing which will bring the present age to an end \u2014 but where Galadriel mourned the passing of the past, Serafina looks forward to the future and to the \u201cprogress\u201d it will bring.<\/p>\n And so we come to the film\u2019s treatment of religion. Serafina says the coming war \u2014 which, in the second and third books, is revealed to be a war against the Judeo-Christian God \u2014 will bring an end to \u201cdestiny\u201d and establish a new era of \u201cfree will.\u201d What that means exactly is not spelled out, not in this movie, but we can get a sense of it from the fact that nearly all of this film\u2019s villains work for the church-like Magisterium, which spends much of its time \u201ctelling people what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n The filmmakers have been at pains lately to say that they toned down the book\u2019s anti-religious content, and that may be true to the extent that the movie never uses words like \u201cchurch\u201d or \u201cGod.\u201d But the word \u201cmagisterium\u201d does refer, in the real world, to the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church, and the film is still peppered with religiously significant words like \u201coblation\u201d and \u201cheresy,\u201d as well as a cryptic reference to \u201cour ancestors\u201d who \u201cdisobeyed the Authority\u201d \u2014 that is, to Adam and Eve and their disobedience against God in the Garden of Eden.<\/p>\n