Jean Kazez has a review of The Golden Compass, which she liked, which just shows that matters of taste are always because they are most of the times completely subjective. Her review is interesting because she gives the movie, in my opinion more credits than it deserves by interpreting its meaninglessness. Sugary excerpt:
A moviegoer could come away thinking Pullman [Philip Pullman the author of the book] is for witches and demons and multipe universes, talking polar bears and mysterious dust. The movie’s real theme, though, is truth. Good in the movie is lined up with free inquiry and the unimpeded search for the truth. Evil is the monstrous institution of the magisterium, which battles against the truth- seekers.
But wait, if the movie is pro-truth, why shouldn’t it be construed as pro-God, or even pro-Jesus. (Wasn’t it Jesus who said “I am the way and the truth”?) It will take any moviegoer a moment of honest reflection to admit the power of the movie’s message. All religions claim contact with truth, but they don’t empower members of the religion to be truth-seekers themselves.
I’m not just talking about the obvious cases, like the Roman Catholic church. I think the same is true even in the most liberal religious communities. The movie brilliantly makes children the target of the magisterium–it’s brilliant because children really are the crux of the matter. They don’t yet believe, and will ask challenging questions, if permitted.
This whole business of teaching children “truths” before they’re mature enough to make up their own minds is tricky. We do it all the time. We teach them all sorts of facts before they can verify them as facts. We teach them moral values before they can discuss morality. We teach them political attitudes before they are in any position to understand the pro’s and con’s.
Religion is a special case. For one reason, that’s because children are allowed to ask questions about all the other topics, but discouraged from asking questions about religion. In the middle of a religion class, even at the most liberal church or synagogue, a child cannot raise his or her hand and say “is there really a god”?
I wish that I had seen the same movie as she had or maybe I was too distracted by the images and the fact that the actors were using a dialogue that they themselves didn’t seem to understand to realize that the movie actually got somewhere or to something. There is something that I know for sure after watching the movie and it is that the book has to be entertaining, but isn’t good? I don’t know and I may never know because the movie didn’t make me want to read the book, it made me want to reread the last Harry Potter book.
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