icy nicole kidman

Sadly I have to say that the movie version of The Golden Compass did disappoint me slightly.  I hadn’t read any reviews prior to going to the theater, but I had read the book before I saw the movie so that did color my expectations.  Oh, visually speaking it was quite impressive and I was also very pleased with the casting.  The ever-lovely Nicole Kidman was a great choice for icy and remote Mrs. Coulter and Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel also made me happy.  Sam Eliot as Lee Scoresby and Ian McKellan providing the voice of Iorek Byrnison further strengthened the film.  What bothered me was the rapid acceleration of the overall story.  In my opinion, plot points from the end of the book were introduced far too early in the movie.  Part of that is understandable, because compressing a four hundred page novel into a two-hour movie is not an easy task, but it did dumb down the story and made me appreciate the novel even more than I already did.  Instead of a complex tale with careful internal thinking, we have characters spouting exposition to keep everything moving at a brisk pace and I found that to be very annoying.  Entire passages of the book and a few key characters were dropped from the movie.  To be fair, their absence did not negatively affect the overall story that much, but they were still missed by me.