Is another fantasy trilogy really necessary?

When there is an insurmountable surge of hype coming before the launch of a children’s movie I have to ask myself if the children are creating it, or just greedy adults. And since many children still wear Velcro shoes and pick their noses, I’m taking a stab in the dark when guessing they aren’t the brains behind this sudden push to sell The Golden Compass.

With Harry Potter, the children brewed up their own smash hit, and their parents seemed to be pulled along for the ride. The reverse seems to be true with The Golden Compass, a movie that is sneaking up on youngsters and being forced upon them by adults who don’t know better.

Consider the plot, which is pock-mocked with every fantasy-movie cliché, like landmines in the Korean DMZ. It hits all the majors: a person born of prophecy who will end a war that hasn’t yet started, talking creatures, various kings in disrepute, mythical objects everyone seeks at every turn, alternate worlds, disappearing witches, loner warriors hired as bodyguards, a plot that requires a trilogy of films … Lord of the Rings had all these too, but it invented some of them so it’s off the hook.

Remove all the cliché, all the fantasy fluff, all the overblown magical hoo-ha, and what you have is a film that was designed to bridge the financial gap between the next Harry Potter and Narnia flicks. Makes me wish they were still making NeverEnding Story movies, and I hated the whole series, but at least they defied at least some fantasy convention.

Compass concerns a universe of interconnected worlds. Somehow a magical property called dust travels between these worlds, but we’re not meant to understand that yet — maybe in the sequel. In the one world we’re shown, people co-exist with talking animals that serve as their companions; apparently they also share a soul. The little creatures — in the form of birds, mice, cats, dogs, ferrets — are called dæmons (pronounced demons), which is a word uselessly thrown around to annoy movie critics who have to go character fishing for “æ.” The creatures can talk, but can’t venture too far from their masters.

Again, because this is the first leg of an epic tripod the movie leaves out much of its meaning or purpose, like the importance of the dæmons, the dust, the alternate worlds and of a strange device called the alethiometer, which can tell the absolute truth to a person who deciphers its Norwegian instruction booklet.

The plot, culled directly from Philip Pullman’s hit book, is indescribable, but the effort shown to it by its stars is commendable, especially little Dakota Blue Richards, a 13-year-old who channels Cate Blanchett’s grace and well-designed face. She plays Lyra, a little girl with a ferret dæmon who comes across the golden truth compass. She runs into a supporter (Lord Asriel, played by 007 actor Daniel Craig) and a villain (Marissa Coulter, played by ice princess Nicole Kidman) before being sent north into a vast sea of snow, where much of the movie takes place.

It’s there on those Arctic fields she encounters the movie’s best creatures: armor-clad polar bears. One of them is the Aslan/Gandalf/Falkor character, voiced by Gandalf himself, Ian McKellen. Warrior polar bears with removable armor … these movies inspire boys’ Christmas lists. In any case, the animation on the main bear — a name straight from Odin’s family tree, Iorek Byrnison — is stellar and he’s bound to get you dragged to the zoo by your children to see a real polar bear.

For a fantasy film, though, Compass is not very fantastical. Sure, the battle-scarred polar bears and warring timber wolves are pretty wild, but it’s nothing we didn’t see already in the first episode of The Chronicles of Narnia. Most of the villains, though, are human, some of whom make their base in a sterile boarding school. Other settings include an Alaskan fishing village and an academic institute with high ceilings and fine cabinetry. Remove the animals and all you have is a chase movie that could be taking place in our world and in our time. Where’s its imagination?

Will your little ones care, though? Unlikely. They’ll find it magical and heaps of fun. You will see through it and long for better fantasy films.

And then you’ll be shocked by one joke in particular: Kidman, in a fit of rage, slaps her dæmon, a tangerine-colored monkey. Yes, she slaps her monkey. I write that not to garner cheap laughs from my more immature readers (greetings fellas!) but to show you how this movie grasps for material, even at the expense of good taste. Will children get the joke? Probably not, but they’ll want to know why all the mommies and daddies are snickering at a poor little monkey. And don’t tell me mature adults won’t find it funny because the audience I saw the monkey-slapping scene not only snickered but with roared hysterically.

So who’s this movie aimed at? Children or the adults that think this is what children need and have the wallets to buy into it?