Tom Piatak rips into "The Golden Compass," specifically the so-bad-it's-funny rave review that Harry Forbes, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' man in the movieplex, gave to the film. The fact that the book's author has explicitly said that his young adult novels are "about killing God," and that his villains represented an organization called "the Magisterium," Forbes saw nothing much to complain about. (The USCCB later withdrew the review.) Excerpt from Piatak's blast:
The USCCB’s review captures in microcosm the dominant malady of the West: an unwillingness to defend one’s own against even open and obvious enemies. The poor immigrants and their offspring who scrimped and saved to build the myriad churches, schools, convents, and universities that dot Catholic America would have been shocked by bishops who, through the bureaucrats they employ, effectively recommended that parents expose their children to cinematic atheism. After all, those bishops began the daunting task of creating a Catholic school system because they feared that the cultural Protestantism then found in American public schools would undermine the faith of Catholic children they regarded as their highest duty to safeguard.Rather than hoping to appease a hostile culture, the American Catholic bishops used to try to shape that culture.
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The movie is simply badly made. It's incoherent, tries to jam too much into too little space left for exposition, and changes the ending in a way that will make little sense if they *do* ever get to books 2 and 3.
Well, that's movie-making for you. Happens all the time.
While the film leaves out the part about Pope John Calvin moving the papal seat to Geneva, and then the papacy being abolished after his death (presumably leaving Genevan predestinationists in control of that world's religion), it does include a visual image *not* in the original book. Rod, I'm surprised you're not all over this one like fleas on a dog, because the film directly goes after Eastern Orthodoxy.
The panzer-bear Iorick has had his armor stolen. He discovers it's been hidden "in the magisterium's headquarters" in the little "Scandinavian" town. The Magisterium HQ is in a chapel with Orthodox-style icons painted on the exterior walls. When Iorick recovers his armor, he literally busts through the wall, smashing the icons in the process.
This is rude and tasteless on so many levels. For one thing, it's cowardly - it picks on a minority of a minority slice of Christianity (at least in the UK and USA.) So they probably thought they were picking on a Christian group without a bully pulpit.
For another, it does directly make the film look as if smashing an icon is "liberation" in that world. When you consider what an icon *means* to Eastern Christians, it's a pretty explicit way to say, "This is what we think of your belief in a supernatural world."
Which is really dumb, when you think about it, because the whole *premise* of the His Dark Materials trilogy is ... uh, that there are other worlds.
"I do not go to church anymore … I guess you might say I've come around to secular humanism, an obligation I believe all humans have to others and the world we live in."
-Charles Schulz, in the late 1980s.
Whether this means that he was actually an atheist or simply that he had doubts, I don't think it matters to the people who won't go see this movie because the author is an atheist. I suspect that 'secular humanism' is almost as bad of a term to them as 'atheist.'
As for myself, I'm not going to see this movie. The reviews have been so-so, and I don't like wasting $10 at the theaters anyway. The fact that I might agree with the author's opinions on organized religion and the nature of the universe has nothing to do with it.
On a different note- How many Christian families went and supported "The Chronicles of Narnia" simply because it was allegorically Christian? I saw the movie, and since I liked the books as a kid, I kept an open mind. But wow, what an awful movie. I didn't really get why Aslan had to be killed (some sort of technicality, right? So Jesus died because of semantics? What kind of religious philosophy is that?) and also how he magically rose from the dead. He's a lion! It made no sense.
Lastly: why was I the only one disturbed that the movie glorified children who strapped on armor and fought in medievalesque battles? Don't 'values voters' get up in arms about violence on television and movies? Did this movie get a pass because it's "Christian" violence? Somebody explain this to me.
Corey, I won't attempt to explain it to you, because it seems clear to me that you don't really remember the book you read as a kid.
The movie covered the key plot elements of the book, period. That it did so well or poorly is a matter of individual opinion, and I am content to leave it at that. I enjoyed the movie on several levels, but found it still inferior to the BBC series from the 80s of LWW, Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Prince Caspian (featuring Tom Baker as Puddleglum). The TV production, limited in how it could portray the fantasy elements, was strong on plot and character development. That's what I look for in quality cinema, and didn't see as much of in the movie.
You're right, I don't remember the books word-for-word. I didn't claim to. I said I remembered liking the books as a kid. I read the first one and went on to read the rest of books in the series (or at least a good number of them). When I viewed the movie last year, I did not care for it. Whether that was because I outgrew the story, or because I didn't find the movie very well done, who knows.
And why can't you "attempt to explain it to me?" Please, explain (briefly) why Aslan had to die (and how he came back to life). It was because the younger boy promised something to the Witch. Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Enlighten me, please.
Corey, it's not an explanation, it's a plot device. That it also is an indirect parallel to the death and resurrection of Jesus is noteworthy, but not important to the story as a whole. Lewis did not invoke anything overtly Christian until The Last Battle, which you may not have read, and which gets rather heavy handed at the end. One does not need to be a Christian or familiar with its tenets to understand the plot devices. I intended no insult to your intelligence above; I regret if you may have taken it that way.
Briefly: Edmund betrayed his siblings. The Witch, having been there (as we find out in The Magician's Nephew) from the very creation of Narnia, is entitled to the lives of all betrayers (again, an indirect parallel to Satan). The Stone Table may be seen as a rough equivalent to the Bible (or, perhaps, the short-lived tablets containing the Ten Commandments), and it spells all this right out (in runes, of course) to anyone who cares to read it. Obviously, the Witch only read the parts that pleased her.
There are some, including myself, who see Aslan's "sacrifice" in Edmund's place as somewhat cynical. Aslan knew the Table would break and he would be brought back to life. As I started, if you look at it as a plot device, you find it less important to understand out of context.
If you are saying or implying that the translation from book to cinema was flawed in this movie, I will immediately agree with you.
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