A Dull Adaptation, and There Wasn't Enough of It

There's an old joke about people complaining that the food at a resort is almost inedible, and what's more, the servings are too small. The Golden Compass movie fits that model. It was disappointingly shallow and pedestrian, but probably could have been exciting and rich if there had only been more of it.

The cast was well chosen and the scenes' visuals, with one exception (which I'll discuss tomorrow), are handsome, and I could have spent much more time in those settings. The dialogue, however, leaps so desperately from one expository moment to another that there's little room for character development.

New York magazine's comparison of two early scripts for The Golden Compass with each other and the final film traces what could have been:

Like many fans, we'd always assumed that [Tom] Stoppard's draft must have been a work of genius, and that his replacement by [Chris] Weitz surely doomed the project. Much to our surprise, upon reading the screenplays, we're wrong. Had Stoppard's screenplay been filmed, the movie would have been ponderous, a bit dull, and far too long. Weitz's original script was actually great and makes us sad about the movie that could have been. . . .

Weitz's early draft, though still long — 156 pages and likely three hours of running time — is sharper, funnier, and more streamlined than Stoppard's. It's also more exciting, more coherent, and significantly better than the final product. . . . Why was this all cut? Presumably, to keep the film to two hours. . . . In the end it was that decision more than any other that doomed The Golden Compass to mediocrity.

Most notably, of course, both early screenplays contain the end of the book, the crucial sequence cut from the movie entirely so that its ending would remain uplifting.

Chris Kohler at Wired agreed that, "Many of the problems with Golden Compass can be blamed squarely on the film's run time."

Rope of Silicon has posted a link to some footage cut from the end of the movie but included in the videogame. Stills from the same scene show up in picture-book adaptations of the movie, so the cut must have come relatively late. Obviously Weitz filmed something like the book's ending, but in concurrence with New Line studio cut those final scenes to make the movie shorter and less downbeat.

IMDB.com confirms something I’d suspected: those final scenes might show up at the start of a Subtle Knife movie, should one be made from the second book in Philip Pullman's trilogy. There the footage would serve as a bridge from Lyra's adventure to the new story (which starts with a different protagonist), and establish the stakes in the new plot. But will that movie now be made, given The Golden Compass's lackluster domestic earnings? The all-important worldwide box office figures will say.