Herewith the excoriation. Spoilers for books and film.
Not nearly enough establishing of the daemons, what they can do and so on. Considering I was there for the shapeshifting talking animals, I was entirely gypped. They needed one more reinforcement of “you never ever EVER touch someone else’s”, too.
Two instances of people with identical daemons (both pairs of guards done for stupid symmetry reasons), which is wrong.
Pantalaimon’s voice was appropriate. Hester‘s was absolutely perfect. Scoresby’s entire portrayal was an exaggeration, but perhaps he was so in the source. I didn’t notice him much in the books.
Underwhelmed by Iorek.
Two opportunities to establish “daemon dominating other daemon = human dominating other human” elegantly and subtly, both missed. For example, Lyra talking to Asriel — instead of “Quiet, Pan” and a brief cut to the daemons, we should have heard the conversation while seeing Stelmaria staring Pan down.
Tech was good. I had no mental image, but that could have been it.
No thoughts on Asriel and Coulter. Don’t have a mental image of them, and those two actors aren’t it. Stelmaria was pretty. The monkey wasn’t pretty or savage enough.
They surprised me by letting Lyra be properly scruffy and urchinlike.
Guy playing the Magisterium agent was perfect facially, although the combover was going a bit far.
Essential lines cut. Including one that, to me, gives an essential bit of worldbuilding: “Pan, be a bat and go and see for me.” Pullman’s sparing with his details about daemons can do, and that line, along with Pan and Salcilia on the wall of the cafeteria when their conversation splits the children’s attention, is very important in a worldbuilderly sense. I very much missed the bit about bears being impossible to trick during the stupidly curtailed Iofur (ahem, Ragnar, wtf) scenes. The idea that daemons can’t travel very far from their humans, absolutely CRUCIAL, was nowhere to be found except when Pekkala mentioned that witches’ can. We didn’t see Kaisa, and I liked his trick with the snow on the lock in the book, so was disappointed.
The severed children were handled superficially and wrongly. There should have been MUCH more time devoted to them. Costa was daemonless, which is the most disgusting thing in the world, and his mother (yes, ahem, why was she there?) fairly calmly said “oh well, we’ll find Ratter”. Wrong. Losing your daemon is supposed to be a terrible fate, literally soul-destroying, causing the adults to be horribly superstitious and frightened — and the events immediately following Billy’s death establish something very important about Lyra. All missing from the film. We don’t even hear of him again after he is rescued for great protagonist-ego.
The daemon-cutting machine wasn’t at all as I pictured it. And in the book I loved the fact that Lyra used flour, vs the boring option in the film.
Why were the witches Supermanning around instead of flying on branches?
Pan was too often a pine marten. I don’t remember him being very often in the first book; it’s a case of clumsy foreshadowing, forgetting that Lyra changes and grows up a LOT before they settle.
Fight scenes were overwhelmingly… dull. 0.o
I was surprised by where they chose to end it. Rather important scene missing. Come on, hollytards, the readers of this book can cope with an unhappy ending.
Why oh why did they crowbar in the words “golden compass!112!3.141592!” so many times? It was positively awkward to hear. Not gold and not a compass, anyway. And why was there no mention whatsoever of the northern lights, by whatever name?
Song on the credits was the worst song in the entire history of worstness. And grief, I had no idea it was Kate Bush. I stand by my condemnation. It was excruciating to listen to.
In summary, this needed to be a BBC series, not an American film. Just as Harry Potter did, but more so. The American industry cannot possibly do this book justice. They are too retarded and think their audience is too. I wonder how SUBTLE their Subtle Knife will be, ROFL.
Verdict: total intercision of the book, which I expected, but didn’t even have an abundance of pretty animals.
edit: Totally forgot to say, but I did NOT think they sold out on the atheism! At least, as an atheist apatheist (my favourite new word) viewer, I completely understood without difficulty what the evul Magisterium represented. It may not be overtly labelled as “this is X Religion”, but it’s characterised with the things I see as wrong about most religions. This was satisfactory to me.
