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Beyond The Golden Compass
By kirk noonan | December 18, 2007
The Golden Compass, based on Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, has been deemed a box office disappointment. In North America, according to Variety, the film made $25,783,232 during its opening weekend. By Hollywood standards that is a colossal failure when the $180,000,000 it cost to make the movie is taken into account.
So why did a much-hyped, star-studded and critically acclaimed movie do so poorly at the box office?
Some speculate that religious-minded people — who accuse Pullman of bashing God and religion in his books —thwarted the movie with an aggressive Internet and e-mail campaign. In the weeks leading up to the movie’s release, e-mails warning viewers to avoid the movie bombarded Inboxes across the nation. And for good reason.
A HollywoodJesus.com reviewer describes elements of The Golden Compass in a way that would scare any Christian parent.
Essentially, dust (sin) entered the world and dust provides you with knowledge, truth, and freedom. The Magisterium (Church) doesn’t want you to have dust. The reasons that the Magisterium doesn’t want dust around are never made clear, and the first hour of the film rambles on with very little character development, and some truly bizarre ideas. I think what shocked me the most was the outright promotion of kids disobeying their parents, disobeying adults, and spitting (literally) on authority. Never mind that God is referred to as The Authority. The film also promotes the old humanist idea of do-whatever-you-want-as-long-as-it doesn’t-hurt-anyone-else. (Other than God or the Church.) Despite this, the film not once deals with the consequences of choosing bad over good, and it’s very vague on the subject.
If Josh Bell of Las Vegas Weekly is to be believed, the movie didn’t do as well as expected because it wasn’t a great movie.
Like so many recent fantasy films, Compass has more than its share of ambition, but [Chris] Weitz, whose previous experience is as a co-filmmaker of relationship comedies (American Pie, About a Boy) with his brother Paul, gets lost in the scope, delivering a movie without focus, a pretty, baffling spectacle about serious events that goes out of its way to say nothing at all.
No matter why the movie flopped sometimes saying nothing at all is a good thing.
Recently, I interviewed a Christian moviemaker who is responsible for bringing some of the best family-friendly movies to the big screen in the last decade. When I asked him to comment on The Golden Compass he refused. Instead, he told me that God had called him to tell redemptive stories and he was going to concentrate on becoming excellent in that rather than critiquing other people’s work.
Though keeping each other informed of danger, critiquing culture, and taking a stand against adversaries is important; there is also room in our lives for focusing on, promoting and striving for excellence in sharing the most redemptive message of them all — the story of Jesus.
Topics: Entertainment |
December 19th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
I love the response of the Christian Moviemaker, “God had called him to tell redemptive stories.” Redemptive storytelling brings light, and light will always drive back darkness.
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:55 pm
The internet campaign might have had some impact on the movie bombing, but in the past, those types of Christian-led campaigns have actually had the opposite affect. See The DaVinci Code and The Last Temptation of Christ for examples of how poorly executed protests can backfire. I don’t really know why the movie bombed, but I’m glad it did. We already have enough anti-God sentiment permeating pop culture as it is.