The Golden Compass by, C.S. Lewis

I went to see the Golden Compass yesterday, as I said I would.  I thought it was a good movie overall and I expect that the book is much better.  It did suffer from what I call Lord of the Rings syndrome,or LOTRS for short.  LOTRS occurs when a production team attempts to fit a long and complex story into a movie.  The LOTR all told, was at least nine hours long and an incredible movie but it did not do the story justice at all.  It was like a condensed children’s version of the story but, to do it right they would have had to at least double the length.  No one wants to sit through that so, they did the best they could.  I suspect the Golden Compassis the same way, though I still have not read it.  They had to tell the story, introduce the audience to a foreign universe, introduce new characters, and get the audience emotionally invested in the characters’ individual plights all in less than two hours.  Still it is more than worth the price of a movie ticket.  The polar bear fight is worth the price of a movie ticket. 

So what is my fundamentalist Christian take on the movie?  Well, one of the primary reasons I wanted to see the movie was to see if they could make a entertaining good v. evil story, without it being an allegory for Christ.  They could not.  I think this is telling.  It was (and is, it is a trilogy so the story is not over) a beautiful messiah narrative.  The Christian undertones where at least as strong as the Chronicles of Narnia. C.S. Lewis would have been proud to call it his own. 

I find it interesting that the Magisterium, the organization that represents the church or religion and evil looks more like a secular anti-religious organization than a church.  The truththat the Magisterium is attempting to stamp out is a world filled with the supernatural and the mystical.  The most poignant example of this is the daemons.  In Pullman’s universe, the souls of humans walk beside them at all times in the form of animals, known as daemons.  They are like the person’s spirit.  They are part of what makes a person who they are.  The Magisterium preforms experiments to deprive children of their daemons, that is their souls.  So, the Magisterium is working to rid the world of the spiritual.  That does not sound like any religion that I know of. 

The heroes of the story are attempting to preserve the truth and the villains are persecuting them, in an attempt to smother the truth.  This is exactly the story of the early church and persecution by the Roman Empire and others.  It is the story of the protestant revolution and persecution by the Vatican.  It is a Christian story. 

I still await the day when some one will have the creativity to make a good and evil story with out paralleling reality. 

See also my previous post on the Golden Compass, The Compass and the Cross