When she first appears, she pours across the screen like liquid gold, her body provocatively shifting inside a shimmering, form-fitting gown, her gilt-blond hair and alabaster skin all but glowing. Kidman has rarely looked more beautifully and exotically alien. Coulter, an emissary of the reigning powers (known only as “the Magisterium” in the film), Ms. It’s a tradition that this film honors with a goddess of icy perfection played by the wickedly well-cast Nicole Kidman.Īs Mrs.

Agnostics and atheists may, for starters, regret the explicit absence of the Church (others may see lingering traces), but the movies have never been a particularly good pulpit for any gods other than those of cinema’s own creation. Directed by the American Chris Weitz, who wrote the heavily condensed script, “The Golden Compass” has many of the virtues of a faithful screen adaptation and many of the predictable flaws. That ecclesiastical entity is pretty much nowhere evident in the film, which otherwise hews as close to the original source as can be expected from a 114-minute, big-screen translation of a 400-or-so-page novel. The book has attracted voluble criticism for equally obvious reasons: Its army of darkness is a totalitarian institution called “the Church.” This beastly attitude and the conception of the soul as being somehow separate from its corporeal vessel are, as far as I can tell, the most irreligious conceits in the movie adaptation of “The Golden Compass,” a novel that was first published in Britain as “Northern Lights.” Written by Philip Pullman, it quickly became a critical and commercial success for the most obvious of reasons: It’s a charming romp set in a parallel universe stuffed with magical creatures, spooky villains and mythopoetic conceits, and propelled by a young orphan, Lyra Belacqua, who embarks on the hero’s journey with her shape-shifting daemon, Pantalaimon (Pan for short). In this otherworldly realm, humans have no dominion over these creatures, yet they are not merely equals, either. And because these are no ordinary animals, they also offer words of comfort, advice, warning. Every so often, an animal leaps forward, its fur raised in alarm, its feathers fanned in flight.

The animals, most of which are called daemons and are manifestations of the human soul, hover at the side of their people and near the story’s edge, where their coos and barks mix with the ambient clatter and clang. A fantastic bestiary inhabits “The Golden Compass,” prowling and flapping and slithering and fluttering.

Golden compass 2 full movie