The Golden Compass
This is an interesting high fantasy story, completely butchered by the studio.
Random scenes are cut, the scenes that remain are randomly cut and even their order is almost random. There’s a semblance of a much better film here, with a less insane editing. That’s not even getting to the ending…
As if the studio hadn’t made sufficient stupid decisions, they market this to kids, when there’s a scene where two polar bears fight to the death and the bad-guy bear gets his jaw ripped off from a single paw hit. Bloodlessly, of course.
Visually, I liked it a lot. Certainly on par with their more direct references, Lord of the Rings, Narnia and Harry Potter. The usual staple of British actors, some of them voices only, composes the bulk of the supporting cast. The star of the show is Dakota Blue Richards, a hidden gem that unfortunately went nowhere since this film bombed hard.
This had everything to be a big franchise but got killed in the crib by baffling choices from the studio.
Apparently the books were militant atheist, and since there is no God, this failed to materialise, therefore proving their own point!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.