Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
The
Lion, the Witch, and the Dirigible
(The Golden Compass, 12/17/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Gather
'round children, and let me tell you the tale of The Golden Compass:
Once upon a time, there was a universe
with an infinite number of parallel worlds existing adjacent but isolated
from each other. One of these worlds is a lot like Earth except the
people don't have souls living inside their bodies but outside them,
in the form of particular animals that reflect their personalities.
And yeah, since children's personalities aren't set yet, their "daemons"
are shape-shifters. (And no, nobody's daemon is a louse or a stomach
virus, OK? No more questions until the end, please...)
Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) is a
tweedy but hunky professor who doesn't seem to teach anything but instead
does research on "dust," which is not like the stuff on your
furniture but a little like pixie dust that has something to do with
bridging the infinite parallel worlds—a project old Asriel thinks
is very important for some reason and so does his daemon, which happens
to be something like a Bengal tiger that follows him around the halls
of academe but never seems to need meat or a tiger-sized kitty box.
There's this girl named Lyra (Dakota
Blue Richards) hanging around the university who is, like, ten years
old and whose daemon is sometimes a bird, a mouse, a meerkat, or a lynx,
and she's very spunky though she's afraid of the "gobblers,"
who aren't turkeys but have something to do with the "Magisterium,"
a shadowy organization that seems a lot like the Catholic Church and
is very greedy for power. The Magisterium opposes the university, and
the university funds Lord Asriel, who appears to be doing work on pixie
dust that will ultimately benefit the Magisterium, so I'm not sure why
the Magisterium is hassling Lord Asriel—in fact, just forget about
that last part, OK? What you really need to know is that the Magisterium
hunts the professor with nasty guys with wolfish daemons who look like
Cossacks but sound a bit like Tibetan throat singers.
Anyway, Lyra is sort of recruited
away from campus by Ann Coulter ... I mean Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman)
... a sequined sylph with a giant golden tamarin for a daemon, and who
covets a special device Lord Asriel gave to Lyra called an "alethiometer,"
which is a golden compass that always points to the truth. After riding
a jet-powered dirigible to a city that looks like an all-inclusive Caribbean
resort, Lyra learns that Ann Coulter is not as nice as she seems because
she sends her spirit tamarin to twist the ears of Lyra's meerkat when
Lyra won't stop wearing a tacky shoulder-bag.
Lyra escapes with the compass and
heads to the north pole with the Gyptians—a bunch of scruffy pirates,
but totally nice—to rescue Lord Asriel (who actually isn't in the
story very much, when you think about it ...). There she befriends the
bad-tempered king of the polar bears (Ian McKellen) who's been dispossessed
of his bruiny throne and has lost his armor until Lyra helps him get
it back, in thanks for which the bear pledges his support in finding
Lyra's friends, who have been taken to a place where the Magisterium
sort of takes away kids' free will by turning their daemons into pixie
dust. I wouldn't want to give away too much here but there's more trouble
along the way for Lyra, who is joined in her quest—whatever it
is—by a flying witch in green crepe (Eva Green) and a cowboy in
a blimp (Sam Elliott).
Now then, any questions?
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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