The Golden Compass is a fantasy film, but unlike any other fantasy film, there's an atheistic bent to it. This is where most of the controversy has come from, which has seemed to die down. The Catholic league initially branded the film has anti religious, but it doesn't seem to be. Weary about the controversy, director Chris Weitz removed all mentions of God from the movie. Having not read the original His Dark Material novels, I am unaware of differences between the novels and the movie. Roger Ebert describes the film as a: “darker deeper fantasy epic than the Rings trilogy, the Chronicles of Narnia or the Potter films.” For the uninitiated The Golden Compass, revolves around a young orphan girl named Lyra Belacqua who lives in Oxford, England.
However, this England is more like a parallel universe where the world is run by the organization known as the Magisterium. The Magisterium is clearly a stab at organized religion, which probably where the whole controversy started from. Anyway I digress; in this parallel universe every individual has a daemon. A daemon is essentially an animal that is a physical manifestation of your soul. And if your daemon gets hurt, you get hurt, and if you daemon perish you will too. Lyra daemon is named Pantalaimon who is not only her daemon, but her best friend. He's a shape shifter who can transform into any form, from a mouse to a leopard. But his primary form is that of a weasel.
Lyra's uncle is Lord Asriel, a professor at the Oxford University and his daemon is a snow leopard. Asriel at the university discovers the existence of Dust, which from what I understand is an allegory for God. His colleagues dismiss his theory as heresy and his theories are quickly disregarded. But they still agree to give him funding for the expedition to the north. Meanwhile, Lyra is approached by Marisa Coulter who tries befriend Lyra by taking her to the north as her assistant. But Lyra quickly realizes her attentions are less than noble. Coulter is after the golden compass that can help answer inquiries about anything you want. Lyra escapes Coulter and befriends Iorek Byrnison, a talking ice bear that helps her on her quest to find her uncle Asriel, who has been kidnapped by Marisa Coulter. The film is very entertaining, thrilling and often times funny, and it reminded a little bit of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And I didn't see anything inherently anti-religious about the film.
Roger Ebert who gave the film a four star review, states that: “Attentive as I was, I was unable to find anything anti-religious in the movie, which works above all as an adventure.” Ebert also states: “Let me just say that I think, The Golden Compass is a wonderfully good looking movie, with exciting passages and a captivating heroine in Lyra. That the controversy surrounding it obscures its function as a splendid entertainment.”
