Lyra challenges this practice, after taking the advice of the grizzled pilot Lee Scoresby ( Sam Elliott) to find herself an armored bear. Turns out the Magisterium is experimenting on the captured children by removing their souls and using what's left as obedient servants without free will. When two characters threaten each other, their daemons lead the fight. Lyra's is a chattering little creature who can be a ferret, mouse, fox, cat, even a moth. When they are with children, these spirits are shape-shifters, but gradually they settle into a shape appropriate for the adult who matures. I should explain that in this world, everyone has a spirit, or daemon, which is visible, audible and accompanies them everywhere. Coulter ( Nicole Kidman), who suspiciously offers her a trip to the north aboard one of those fantasy airships that looks like it may be powered by steam. Lyra's friend Roger (Ben Walker) disappears, one of many recently kidnapped children, and Lyra hears rumors that the Magisterium has taken them to an Arctic hideaway. The Magisterium has a horror of the truth, because it represents an alternative to its thought control the battle in the movie is about no less than man's preservation of free will. An orphan raised by the scholars of a university not unlike Oxford or Cambridge, she is the niece of Lord Asriel ( Daniel Craig), who entrusts her with the last surviving Alethiometer, or Golden Compass, a device that quite simply tells the truth. The film centers on a young girl named Lyra ( Dakota Blue Richards), in an alternative universe vaguely like Victorian England. Attentive as I was, I was unable to find anything anti-religious in the movie, which works above all as an adventure.

may represent more confident believers whose response to other beliefs is to respond, rather than suppress.įor most families, such questions will be beside the point.

The books have been attacked by American Christians over questions of religion their popularity in the U.K. This version by New Line Cinema and writer-director Chris Weitz (' About a Boy') leaves aside religion and God, and presents the Magisterium as sort of a Soviet dictatorship or Big Brother. Pullman's evil force, called the Magisterium in the books, represents organized religion, and his series is about no less than the death of God, who he depicts as an aged, spent force. They weren't murky in the original 1995 novel, part of the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, a best seller in Britain, less so here.

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