Achtung! This post is full of spoilage. It assumes you’ve read the books and seen the film. If you don’t want either spoiled, go away!

I was nei­ther dis­ap­pointed nor blown away.

The film begins with a some­what awk­ward pro­logue explain­ing the whole par­al­lel worlds slash dust slash dae­mons slash Mages­terium thing. When it started, I was some­what upset, because I felt it explained too much up front instead of let­ting us dis­cover these things as the film pro­ceeds. Hav­ing fin­ished the film, I still feel this way, but I under­stand bet­ter why they chose to do it.

As with all epic novel series film adap­ta­tion, impor­tant stuff finds its way to the cut­ting room floor. (As if cut­ting rooms exist any­more — every­one does dig­i­tal inter­me­di­ates now.) The books are really for young adults, not chil­dren. And the film­mak­ers decided to make the film adap­ta­tion suit­able for a younger audi­ence. A lot of the sub­tleties of the novel have to be made ... less subtle.

One exam­ple of this loss of sub­tlety is the hand­ing of the alethiome­ter. In the books, the aletheome­ter points to sym­bols in suc­ces­sion or mul­ti­ple times to indi­cate vary­ing lev­els of mean­ing. Lyra inter­prets these sym­bols intu­itively; there are no visions or hal­lu­ci­na­tions. But because this con­cept of lay­ered mean­ing can be dif­fi­cult for younger peo­ple to grasp, the film­mak­ers short­hand the whole process with visions. It is a short­cut that makes sense from a cin­e­matic per­spec­tive, but I felt that the vision sequences weak­ened the emo­tional impact of Lyra’s ability.

Lots of things were done to make the film more acces­si­ble to a younger audi­ence. In the nov­els, touch­ing another person’s dae­mon with your bare hands is the moral equiv­a­lent of rape; when it hap­pens to Lyra at Bolvan­gar, she merely passes out, as though it were sim­ply painful.

The end­ing, I have read, was reworked to end where it does, instead of at the end of the first book. At the end of the first book, Lord Asriel cuts away Roger’s dae­mon (killing him) in order to tear a hole into a par­al­lel world. Not at all a happy, family-​​friendly, hol­i­day movie ending.

All of these changes, indi­vid­u­ally, are under­stand­able. But together, they notice­ably lessen the hor­ror and moral out­rage we are sup­posed to feel over the Mag­is­terium and inter­cis­sion. The movie reads like a naïve, head­strong girl on a fun adven­ture with bears, witches, and bad guys.

All that said, there was a hell of a lot to like. For those who know what’s going on, most of the impor­tant stuff is there. (Some­times, though, it did feel like Lyra had read the book before-​​hand. E.g., when Lyra fig­ures out that the Obla­tion Board is cut­ting away dae­mons.) They haven’t really changed the mes­sage; they’ve just fid­dled with the way in which it is presented.

It is visu­ally scrump­tious. I very much want a jet zep­pelin now. There are some lovely set pieces, and the Lyra/​Iorek rela­tion­ship is devel­oped very nicely. Only occa­sion­ally did the effects look effect-​​y. The focus puller, though, needs to be fired. Lots of buzzes and near misses. More than in any other film I’ve seen recently. The music was ho-​​hum, and the Kate Bush song dur­ing the cred­its was utter yuck. Obtuse lyrics, bland melody. Won’t be win­ning Best Song.

Dakota Blue Richards does an out­stand­ing job. She was a great find. Nicole Kid­man wasn’t bad, either. I had been expect­ing her to be a bit overblown.

So if you enjoyed the books, go see the film. It will not offend you much. If you haven’t read the books, go see the film. But you might leave feel­ing like you’re not entirely sure what’s going on.