Golden Compass marks new direction

MICHAEL CIEPLY

MICHAEL CIEPLY

NOT since Dorothy landed on the witch has a young girl shouldered quite so many worries as 12-year-old Lyra Belacqua.

The fate of the universe, certainly. A movie budget of $180-million (R1.2-billion) at least. The future course of New Line Cinema, perhaps.

The Golden Compass is an ambitious fantasy in which Dakota Blue Richards, a schoolgirl with no previous credits, plays the intrepid Lyra. Supported by Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, Richards' character is the heroine in what is planned to be the first of three movies based on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series of novels .

There have been challenges, including touchy anti-religious themes in the underlying material, a minuet with on-and-off directors and script revisions that continued through late last month.

And Richards is not alone on the learning curve.

Set for release today The Golden Compass is directed by Chris Weitz, best known as a creator of the successful comedy American Pie.

New Line, of course, reinvented fantasy with its Lord of the Rings series, directed by Peter Jackson. But each of those films cost far less than what is being spent on Weitz's movie, the most expensive the studio has ever made.

Not incidentally, New Line's economy-minded corporate parent played with the notion of melding this midlevel studio with its much larger Warner Brothers unit before The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring erupted six years ago.

That idea could again prove attractive if New Line doesn't improve a record that has only lately perked up with Hairspray and Rush Hour 3.

With The Golden Compass much still hangs in the balance. As recently as last month Weitz was revising scenes that set up the movie's complicated story about a girl's struggle against repressive authority.

These revisions are the latest step in a 12-year effort by Hollywood to harness the immensely popular books which were long held back by their idiosyncrasies, including the presence of an animal, or daemon, for every human character.

The Golden Compass begins at a vaguely familiar Oxford University, where the author attended Exeter College. But technology has veered towards so-called anbaric lights and fanciful zeppelins.

The North is full of witches and armoured bears. And a twisted church and its allies are into separating children from their soul-mate daemons, for reasons fraught with deeper metaphysics than Hollywood can typically digest. - © (2007) New York Times