The girl, Lyra, is very intelligent and utterly fearless. She's a bit of a tomboy, but she knows how to use her wits to get by. She goes into a situation with both mental barrels and she does an impressive bit of quick thinking. She does not wait to be rescued, and she puts her life on the line in virtually every scene. She's a great role model for young women because she's both tough and smart.
That being said, here are some of my other reactions:
- The movie seemed to be very simplistic, it was not anti-faith, but rather the Magisterium is portrayed as a power-mad and power-hungry bureaucracy. The magisterium is concerned about 'freethinkers' and 'heretics,' but there wasn't anything specifically anti-religious or anti-God about the film itself.
- The concept of each person having a daemon, an animalistic embodiment of their souls that walks alongside them is kind of interesting, but I had several problems with it. — The daemons seem to mirror the characters' occupations and personalities. If this was the case, it was very classist that the kitchen boy had a puppy dog daemon, the Gyptian boy had a rat daemon, and the porters and other staff had dog daemons. To me, that was like saying if you have a Labrador retriever, you won't be able to be anything in society that is higher than a butler.
- The bear fight scene was far too vicious for many children. Even though it was CGI, the actions of the battle were disturbing to me, and I'm nearly 31 years old.
- The witches were very artfully done, but their physical nature was kind of inconsistent. If they can fly and disappear into thin air, then why can they be shot?
- Sam Elliot was an interesting touch, but he was very out of place. He was a caricature of an old west cowboy and his aw-shucks dialog was pretty much vestigial and pointless.
Overall, I think it made a great looking movie. The action was very intense, at times too much so for children. Using the concept of parallel universes is always tricky though, and this one had some problems, even for a sci-fi devotee such as myself. I would give this 3 out of 5 stars. Somewhere between see at matinee price or wait for video.
2 comments:
Really? I thought the bear fight was too tame. There was an antiseptic lack of blood, even when the one got his jaw ripped off. I mean, how can you get your jaw ripped off without bleeding? Especially when you're dressed all in white, and it would totally show.
I agree about the classist implications of the daemons being shallow icons of their partners' stations in life. It's insulting to the animals, too: Haha, you're a monkey; you must represent cunningness and treachery! Haha, you're a rat; your person must be poor! And where's all the animals that aren't part of the gee-whiz Animal Planet set? Where's the guy walking around with a turkey following him? Where's the guy who has to live by the ocean because his daemon is a cuttlefish? Where's the lady who's always scratching her hair because her daemon is a head louse?
The movie made poor use of the daemons it did have, too: We're supposed to feel revulsion at the bad people separating kids from their daemons, but we never got properly introduced to what kind of relationship people have with their daemons in the first place. Lyra's daemon is a bit player for most of the movie; we forget that she's carrying him around in the same way that we forget that she probably brushes her teeth every morning, and we care just about as much.
Yes, the lack of blood did anesthetize the scene a bit, but the ripping off of the jaw was in my humble opinion too gruesome for most of the childhood set.
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