Books at the Box Office: Golden Compass

Raise you hand if you didn’t realize this book trilogy was actually about killing God when you read it in the second grade. Just me? Alright….moving on. Rereading it in college,for a course on children’s literature, was a very different experience, and that movie…huh. It won an Oscar for visual effects but uh…no one really liked it, LOL. But did anyone really LIKE the book? I know it’s just…eh. It didn’t hold up as well to a re-read.

Alright, the book first. It was originally a trilogy, but the author has since published some other books in the universe, which I have not read.

Lyra is rushing to the cold, far North, where witch clans and armored bears rule. North, where the Gobblers take the children they steal–including her friend Roger. North, where her fearsome uncle Asriel is trying to build a bridge to a parallel world.

Can one small girl make a difference in such great and terrible endeavors? This is Lyra: a savage, a schemer, a liar, and as fierce and true a champion as Roger or Asriel could want.

But what Lyra doesn’t know is that to help one of them will be to betray the other…

And now, the movie:

There’s Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter. There’s Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel. Sam Elliott as Lee Scoresby. Ian McKellan as Iorek, the bear.Freddie Higmore as Lyra’s daemon. Kathy Bates as Lee Scoresby’s daemon. This movie should have been magic,right? Yeah…not so much. They made some weird changes from the book. The effects were “good” but not always enjoyable. IDK what really happened here, tbh, but there’s a reason people were excited about a new adaptation with Lin Manuel-Miranda. They wanted a re-do, LOL.

Rotten Tomatoes gave this 2007 film a 42%, which isn’t bad. But it was not a runaway success.