Current Quote:
"If I understood what was going on it wouldn't be HALF as fun!"



I just wanted to toss out a couple points of interest I noticed from the movie. I will try to keep this relatively spoiler free so it's nothing you wouldn't already know if you have already seen the trailers. With that said, I highly recommend this movie for the reasons below.

if you want to go into the movie fully fresh then don't read below.

so I have to say the movie Golden Compass is a really worth while film. I haven't read the books because having heard about the movie a year ago I stayed away from the books knowing full well that movie adaptations rarely live up to their book counterparts. With that said I will definitely be reading my set as soon as possible.

To me the most interesting thing about the whole movie is the main characters lack of extreme power. In most modern fantasy/scifi stories the main character is special because they are either powerful or have been granted access to something powerful. Harry Potter, Avatar, Star Wars, Spider-man, Lord of the rings, etc, all follow stories about someone who has extreme power or in the case of LotR the character is granted access to something (usually a weapon) of great power. But that is not the case with golden compass. More then once in the movie when the shit was about to go down I was waiting for the main character to whip out the compass and start blasting people away only to remember that the compass can't actually do any of that. Even then you would expect the compass to give important battle information like weaknesses or tell you how to escape from a bad situation but it doesn't. The main character simply uses the compass to gather simple background knowledge of her foe and uses her keen mind to put together a battle strategy to win the day.
That brings me to another really interesting point. The main character is a strong female lead that doesn't have to rely on stereotypically male traits to fit the role. She isn't Keira Knightly in pirates who has to dress like a man, fight like a man, and in general act like a man to be a "strong female role model", instead the character sticks very much with what you would expect a young woman to be but uses her strengths to win the day.

all and all I was very impressed with this movie and urge anyone who actually read all this to check it out (and comment your opinions).

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ps. my website is up if you haven't seen it yet [link]