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But as in the other four recent legendary movie cycles (or franchises as Hollywood calls them), there's a Manichean war afoot between good and evil, and in this case between advocates of freedom of thought and the Magisterium. This is the object everyone seeks, the Holy Grail, the Ring of the Niebelungs or what Hitchcock (who thought it a mere plot device) called the McGuffin.
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Like Harry Potter, Lyra's a blessed spirit, and the Master gives her the last surviving 'alethiometer' - the eponymous golden compass, a magical instrument that provides access to the truth. The tough, independent Lyra (who appears to have had several competing dialect coaches) spends most of her time, between her scientific and philosophical studies, in the company of colourful urchins who in turn appear to be auditioning for Oliver! The film's 12-year-old heroine, the orphan Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), is being cared for by the Master of Jordan College, a liberal institution, while her uncle, the scientist-explorer Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), travels the globe establishing beneficial contact with other universes. This is a parallel universe with electric light but no phones or cars, elegant scientific instruments out of paintings by Wright of Derby, and where the principal means of communication are forms of telepathy, eccentric boats and flying machines seemingly designed by Jules Verne and Heath Robinson.
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Before it moves to Norway and chilly points north, the film begins in a warm, romantic, mythical Oxford (Pullman studied at the same college as Tolkien, and there's a brief, beautiful shot of Exeter's quadrangle and its Sainte Chapelle-style chapel) some time between the late 19th century and 1930. Indeed, for nearly 50 years I've owned a handsome 946-page edition of the Norwegian Nobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter but after numerous attempts have never got beyond the opening paragraph that begins: 'When the lands and goods of Ivar Gjesling the younger, of Sundbu, were divided after his death in 1306, his lands in Sil of Gudbrandsdal fell to his daughter Ragnfrid and her husband Bjorgulfson.'Īll this came back to me when seeing The Golden Compass, adapted from Pullman's Northern Lights by the film's American director Chris Weitz, who has progressed from the junk food of American Pie through the plain English cuisine of Nick Hornby's About a Boy to the Oxbridge high table fare of His Dark Materials. But then I've always have trouble with books about characters called Thrombosis and Paedophile seeking the Crystal Chrestomathy in the land of Pancreatitis.