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Nicole Kidman Kidnaps Kids in 'The Golden Compass' HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA (Hollywood Today) 11/30/07 - "I've obviously played characters before that have done despicable things," says Nicole Kidman. "You have to work from within and try to find the motivations as to why she feels that what she's doing is right, and you hope that her humanity bleeds through." Mrs. Coulter is the beautiful Cruella DeVille of the oppressive Magisterium General Oblation Board, snatching children for dangerous experiments at a lab in the frozen north. "Nicole Kidman was the first person that everyone on the creative side wanted for Mrs. Coulter," says Golden Compass writer-director Chris Weitz. More... |
Armored polar bears and flying witches battle in North Pole fantasy epic.
"It's a very exciting story about being a human being, and how difficult that is," says Daniel Craig who stars as Lord Asriel and is not recognizable as James Bond. "It's about growing up and how what happens in your childhood is the most important part of your life." Like the capable and enigmatic uncle in Jules Verne's A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Lord Asriel has made a startling discovery that runs counter to established scientific dogma. Accompanied by his snow leopard familiar, Lord Asriel is exploring a rift in the structures of time and space at the North Pole. "It's really being done exactly how I imagined it," says Craig. "It's a testament to Chris Weitz's passion, the work of his crew and a story that is so universal, that this world could be brought to life in such a staggering, cohesive way."
This is a world where good witches rule the northern skies, where talking armored ice bears are the fiercest of warriors, and where every human being is joined to its animal spirit creature daemon. Twelve-year-old Lyra runs tame as the ward of stately Jordan College. Lyra is accompanied everywhere by her familiar Pantalaimon, a "daemon" that's a small, ever-changing animal who's the embodiment of her spirit and her voice of reason. Lyra wants to go to the Arctic Circle with her adventurous uncle Lord Asriel, who's investigating his radical theory that there are other worlds where people don't have daemons. The treacherous Mrs. Coulter takes her away to London instead.
The Golden Compass has been called the anti-Narnia. While I'm not sure what that means, the movies are both similar and dissimilar. Both are epic snowbound children's fantasies. The Golden Compass has a better story and better visual effects. It's also much colder, both in it's setting at the North Pole (actually Svalbard, Norway, a thousand miles north of Oslo), and in the performances of its actors who are mostly loners.
As in Stardust, the magical element that Lord Asriel is seeking in the north is the Dust. Fortunately, in The Golden Compass the Dust is really magical dust, and not Claire Danes as in Stardust. The Golden Compass shares the charming Jules Verne look of Stardust, including Victorian flying machines. It lacks Stardust's surprise knockout performance by Robert De Niro as the gay pirate airman. The aeronaut captain in The Golden Compass is Sam Elliott. "Sam has this extraordinary ability to sum up everything we mean by the idea of cowboy," says author Philip Pullman. "The grizzled veteran. The white moustache. The eyes that look a thousand yards." That may be true, but it's also a character we've seen before in Elliott's archetype cowboy sage in Ghost Rider. I was watching for Nicolas Cage to arrive on a motorcycle and have his head ignite.
The Golden Compass is a beautiful film with spectacular visual effects. It's a great story with clever concepts like personal daemons and armored polar bears. The golden compass device itself looks like an oversized pocket watch. When questions are dialed into it by Lyra, it gives visions of the truth. Dakota Blue Richards carries the film. However, the relationship between characters is distant and the talking bears sometimes feel like exposition. For a family adventure, the greatest weakness of The Golden Compass is it has little sense of family.
Distributor: New Line Cinema
Release date: December 7th, 2007 (wide USA)
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of fantasy violence
2 hrs. 3 min.
http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/