Ambrosia Software Web Board: The Golden Compass - Ambrosia Software Web Board

Ugh, you're right. There is no good way to start Subtle Knife.

mrxak, on Jan 5 2008, 10:27 PM, said:

Text looks more mysterious when it's all blacked out, anyway.

G-Spark, on Jan 5 2008, 11:39 PM, said:

I disagree. You could start off with the very final scene of The Golden Compass, all confusion and snow and Dust, with a lot of intense emotion - then switch over to Will. Slowly backtell the information needed to make sense of the opening scene, for those who haven't read the book.

You're right, the climax of the Golden Compass is probably the most powerful scene in the trilogy, and there's no way it can retain that strength when it falls at the beginning, rather than the end. That said, it can still form a powerful and integral part of the movie.

This makes sense too.

Since I haven't 2 cented about this yet:

The Golden Compass was a huge disappointment. The score was crap, the kids couldn't act, it came across very episodic. The role of Lee was HUGELY overblown. The person designing the look of Oxford has clearly never actually been to Oxford.

Also, it had no killer bees.

That said, Daniel Craig, Nicole Kidman and Ian McKellan were all excellent choices.

Killer bees?

Quote

Who?

G-Spark, on Jan 6 2008, 03:08 PM, said:

Didn't you notice that the bear had the same voice as Gandalf?

I finally get to see this in three days. I'll give you my full report afterwards.

CrazyChick, on Jan 7 2008, 05:14 AM, said:

It's a trap!

zurdo, on Jan 7 2008, 01:02 AM, said:

Oh that Ian. Sorry, no I didn't.

No, it's a party.

A few, very subtle differences...

Mmm, it was pretty good. It was better than the Harry Potter movies, but I'm not sure I want to go and see The Subtle Knife if they make it into a movie.
The bears were the best bit, I think. They were exactly how I'd imagined them.

CrazyChick, on Jan 10 2008, 03:48 PM, said:

That's like saying it was better than coming down with salmonella.

Do not compare an opinion to a standard.
Some people thought Harry Potter was good, some didn't. Both are opinions.
I can assure you, though, that no sane person wants to get salmonella.

As for the box office things, it wasn't because it was a bad movie (even though some parts were disappointing) , it was because people didn't want/ want others to see a movie based on a book that says the church is evil, so they announced to their churches that this movie was the work of a satanist and that you would be sinning by watching it (not in every church, but according to my friends, that is what some people said in the churches they go to.)

I thought the books were much better. I think people should read them even if they are religious. If you're afraid that your opinion of your religion will be swayed by a fictional book, maybe said religion wasn't right for you to begin with. If you believed in your religion, you would have just read a book, you might have thought that some of the ideas in it were wrong, but you still might have liked the rest.

Buffalo the Kid, on Jan 11 2008, 12:49 AM, said:

I've had salmonella, and I would not wish it on my enemies.

I finished the book last night, so I can now give my review of the movie.

Much can be said about how it doesn't live up to the book, those types of discussions are never very interesting. It's simply unfair to compare an hour and a half of film to 350 pages. Approaching a movie as anything other than a movie is an uncharitable waste of time. With this attitude in mind (plus the fact that I procrastinated on the book), I watched The Golden Compass without having read it.

MOVIE:

I can therefore say with some objectivity that the movie was boring and poorly executed.

First, the plot was severely stunted. As the story progressed, I was under the impression that they would , and that was only incidental. Once that happened, they loaded into their air balloon and I prepared myself for , and then...roll credits?! It wasn't that resolution was neglected; there wasn't even a problem to be resolved. (Fortunately, this gripe was adequately answered by the book.)

Second, I didn't give a s### about any of the characters. I wasn't even aware that was supposed to be important until someone familiar with the book explained it to me. All of the characterization was haphazard and rushed, to the detriment of my empathy.

Third, the final battle was intolerable. How, you may ask, can an epic battle be ruined? By the suffocating presence of cliches. Witches, WW1 soldiers, Dickensian street urchins, a Wild West gunslinger...The talking polar bear was unusual, of course, but his inclusion pushes the "disparate factions" theme of LOTR into practically self-parody

Bottom line: bad movie.

BOOK:

The book was mixed. The ending is very powerful, but the rest of it contains far too much explanatory dialogue. Maybe I'll write more later.

I finished the book this past weekend. To address the topic title: No, I don't think it's as good as Potter. However you might as well say "not as big as the Internet," "not as expensive as a Bugatti Veyron," or "not as dirty as The Journalist's room." The book was very good and I very much intend to read the others.

On a different tack, I can't fathom how this book causes controversy. Criticism of Christianity? Any such thing levied is so vague and infrequent that, had I not been aware of the controversy surrounding it beforehand, I probably wouldn't have even noticed.

Movie: I liked it in spite of all its glaring inadequacies. It suffered tremendously from Plot Cram and Iorek wasn't remotely how I pictured him. But the casting was spot-on and its depiction of how the aletheiometer was read was well done. I might watch it again because I'm sure I missed something the first time.

The Journalist, on Jan 21 2008, 02:12 AM, said:

The controversy, I think, has much more to do with the author, to a certain extent a not-too-careful reading of the later books, and general overreaction.

It's not the movie that's the problem. It's the book. In the book, they have talk about the overthrow and destruction of God and everything, and in the movie, it's talk about dust and a rescuing a bunch of missing kids.

Doesn't the anti church sentiment increase over the course of the trilogy?

Yes. But it was a lot stronger in the first fourth of the book than at the end of the movie.

This post has been edited by G-Spark: 21 January 2008 - 02:18 PM

Lektor, on Jan 21 2008, 01:58 PM, said:

It does, but again, it was extremely clear in the books that the church in Lyra's world is very unlike the one in ours, so to say it's a criticism of organized religion in our world is simply ridiculous. The book warns against authoritarianism and rampant bureaucracy, it doesn't warn against religion, it proves to be quite agnostic in the end. That the author is an atheist should play no role in the argument, but it's pretty much what people focus on if they've never read the books with an open mind and an understanding of what fiction is. The Amber Spyglass may be hard for some religious people to read, but if their faith is so weak that they fear they'll be turned into atheists or whatever by fiction, they never really had any to begin with.