“The Golden Compass”
Posted on November 17, 2007 - Filed Under Film, Religion |
“The Golden Compass” is what Northern Lights was retitled for its release in America. It’s a smashing book, and so I had high hopes when I read that a film was in production. However, it seems that the people at New Line Cinema have opted to bowdlerize Philip Pullman’s story by stripping away all the anti-religious sentiment that characterized his His Dark Materials trilogy in an attempt to make it more palatable to religious parents worried that little Johnny will stop believing in God if he sees this film. The Atlantic has an excellent piece on the subject here (subscription unfortunately required).
I’m undecided as to whether I’ll go to see it. On the one hand, given I know that the production company has rode roughshod over the objections of the book’s fans and discarded a huge chunk of the book’s character in order to maximise ticket sales, then paying to see it only plays into their cold, number-crunching claws. On the other hand, I’m interested to see how they depict the book’s settings, the casting seems pretty solid (notice the cowboy from the Big Lebowski, Sam Elliot, as Lee Scoresby in the trailer), and Iorek Byrnison (the armoured polar bear in the trailer) is one of the greatest characters ever (although I never imagined that he’d speak like Ian ‘Gandalf’ McKellen).
Even if it turns out that the film is an utter sell-out of the book’s values, maybe some good will still come of it. In that Atlantic article someone representing Christian group frets that this movie, even shorn of the book’s anti-religious slant, is a form of “atheism through the back door”. They worry that children will read the books (the horror!) having seen the film, and thus claim that the film still serves the atheist agenda. If this does happen then it can only be a good thing in my view; maybe if religious children read these books and wrestle with objections to religion when they are young then perhaps when they grow up they’ll have better responses to atheism than censorship. Also, having a polar bear centre stage can’t do the cause of global warming any harm.
I just hope that they at least have the good taste to refer to the Alethiometer by its name most of the time. “The golden compass” sounds moronic in my opinion.
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3 Responses to ““The Golden Compass””
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Damned if you do, damned if you don’t really isn’t it?
Produce the books faithfully and you can’t market them in the US, or extirpate the atheism and you have the exact same wackos claiming it was only done to spread the “agenda” (how come the atheists and gays are the only ones with agendas?) by more covert means.
You finished your human nature and free will essay yet?
The ‘Da Vinci Code’ did pretty well despite it’s peculiar take on Jesus, so I don’t know if being faithful to the book would really have been all that commercially disastrous. The very next day after posting this I saw a ‘debate’ on Fox ‘News’ where various ‘concerned’ types tried to scare parents away from taking their kids to it, so it looks like the film’s going to dogged by this issue even after the makers sold out the book’s character.
I haven’t started the essay yet. I’ll be arguing that a determined world is worth living in.
Seems like most people are going for that title
I think the difference between “the Golden Compass” and the Da Vinci Code is the Helen Lovejoy factor - won’t somebody think of the children?!!!
These types don’t like competition, the idea that something else might influence their kids before they’re fully indoctrinated into their parent’s way of thinking.