A good movie, but by no means a great movie. So much of it felt like setup, and based on the box office receipts there probably won’t be any sequels. I liked the concepts and ideas the movie hinted at, enough that I bought the book, but this movie was not up to the level of other recent fantasy films like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.
(And by the way, can we quit trying to discern the political messages in these movies and the books and enjoy them for what they are? Plus, we all know the Harry Potter series is clearly an indoctrination into communism anyway. What is Dumbledore if not a stand-in for Karl Marx? Sheesh.)
Rating: 3/5
ALSO: I still don’t like any of the Lord Of The Rings movies and never will. Look, we’re… walking… and walking… and here’s an elf and a giant battle and… we’re walking. Christ, what a scam.
and based on the box office receipts there probably won’t be any sequels.
It won the box office this weekend. Even if the sequels weren’t already a foregone conclusion (the book series is a trilogy), that would be enough for a studio exec to green-light them.
And by the way, can we quit trying to discern the political messages in these movies and the books and enjoy them for what they are?
It’s not a “political” message, but this series does, in fact, have a theological agenda. The movie doesn’t make it as clear as the novels that Phillip Pullman is railing against the power-hunger of theocratic institutions in general; the Catholic Church in particular. You’re right in that Harry Potter is primarily just an entertaining yarn, but His Dark Materials (the proper name of the Compass trilogy) doesn’t just demand you discern the message, it wears the message on its sleeve.