The Golden Compass (Grade: B)

Even though I adored Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy, I awaited the film adaptation of The Golden Compass (the first installment) with suspicion. First the directing honors went to Anand Tucker, who helmed the lackluster Steve Martin movie Shopgirl. When he dropped out of the project I hoped a visionary director like Terry Gilliam or Peter Jackson would sign on, but instead Chris Weitz of American Pie and About a Boy fame got the gig.

The good news is that the long-awaited film looks terrific and it features great performances from Dakota Blue Richards as the young heroine, Lyra, and Nicole Kidman as the icy beauty who oversees a scheme to sever children from their daemons (everyone has an animal soul mate called a daemon in the parallel world in which The Golden Compass takes place). And after a slow start, the film wraps up grippingly with an extended series of action and battle scenes in the freezing far North.

A few themes that worked just fine on the page, however, are stilted and downright irritating in the film. In his trilogy Pullman talks a lot about "dust" and particle physics in relation to theological issues such as original sin. To his credit Weitz tries to do justice to these concepts, but he doesn't have nearly enough time to develop the ideas in a clear and satisfying fashion. I suspect that newcomers to PullmanLand could end up scratching their heads when presented with concepts that, quite frankly, are pretty fucking abstract for a family film.

The Golden Compass deserves a better film treatment. Still, Weitz has delivered a a reasonably ripping yarn with plenty of slick CGI effects to keep your eyes dancing even when those pesky puffs of dust get in the way.