Review: The Golden Compass, film-style

I have to say, the people responsible for The Golden Compass's journey from print to the big screen have their act together loads better than those Potter film folks. Whereas the most recent Harry installment felt more like an outline with crucial quotes instead of a fully fleshed out story, this movie stands on its own, independent of the books. And despite the recent controversy with the church, I feel like they did a great job toeing the delicate boundary between doing the books justice and not being blatantly anti-church. The Magisterium comes across more as a governmental body than anything else. In fact, the only direct reference to it being related to the church was the illustrations on one of their buildings depicting holy bodies. Even then, I was only aware that the figures were holy because of the application of artistic conventions I learned from an Art History course in undergrad. I don't quite see where children will get confused about their faith, but that could just be me.

Now what I don't get about this rendition of The Golden Compass is Dust. They began the movie by stating that the Magisterium banned the topic of Dust and that no one knew about it. And yet when people died, their daemons turned into Dust. While it made the dark battle scene super-duper neat to watch, how the hell do people not realize that there is such a thing as Dust, if daemons spontaneously turned into shimmery particles? In the books, the daemons just disappeared. That was it. Much more ambiguous that way.