The Golden Compass ~ Lost in Adaptation

the books were one of my absolute favorites but the movie was physically painful

Anybody else read it as Damons as a kid?😂

Thanku guys for supporting and loving our film and character ❣️😍

Sam Elliot has been in enough good stuff and awful shit that I think he's one of those actors who just likes to work. Like Lance Henrickson, Idris Elba, or Christopher Walken: he just NEVER half-asses it, no matter how awful the script is.

I really really liked this movie when it first released. i was a kid at the time, and had never even heard of His Dark Materials. Later on, when i finally read the book, it felt like Percy Jackson to me. a fantastic and engaging book series, but where did the movie go so wrong??

ive always been baffled by people that can read a story, and say "oh yeah, THAT should be cut out."

but honestly, nostalgia keeps me enjoying this movie, but i will always stand by my opinion that the show is leagues better

I enjoyed the movie until I read all the books and realized HOW MUCH better they were

Romania?

Why we continue to bend the knee to religious conservatives is beyond me.

I remember interpreting Billy’s mom’s words less as a ray of hope and more as a desperate heartbroken parent watching their young child die in their arms. It really wasn’t any better than the way the boy’s death plays out in the book.

I rented the movie once and thought it took forever, then just when it appeared the payoff the movie had been building was near, it ended.
Kinda like the Force Awakens but less enjoyable to watch.
Also I remember the butterflies that the girl had in the closet were obvious cgi because they didn't match the lighting with the rest of the scene. How that wasn't fixed for such an expensive budget is surprising.

I loved this movie as a kid and was so excited to see where they would take it. You can imagine my disappointment when I learned they wouldn't be making any more. I've had the original book on my reading list ever since

it's pronounced day-min

I read the books and watched the movie. It was an ok film, compared to some of the other adaptations coming out around that time it was actually good.

I cannot find the Xena warrior princess episode. Is her channel gone?

I watched this movie after watching His Dark Materials. Boy was I disappointed. It’s like a Cliff Notes version of the story. Everything is surface level. Characters and themes have no time to develop. The show is 1000x better than the movie.

I remember when this movie came out, I had really no interest in seeing it until the pastor at my mom and dad's Methodist Church thought that it was so important to warn against seeing the movie because of its anti-religious themes. Of course, that only made it horribly backfire as all I wanted to do was see this movie. And honestly, I wish that it had turned out to be the movie that this man was so scared of. Even then, I was like why are you even warning about the movie? Doesn't that run the risk of making it sound kind of badass? Like he made this movie out to be some great threat to religion, but what we got was so tame in comparison.

I love your videos, but, in this one, you forgot to mention Tom Courtenay and Derek Jacoby.

I didn’t find the movie as bad, but to each one’s own. I thought it took itself seriously enough, instead of feeling monotone, and having a child lead in something like this who already had a big resume is rare. Maybe I’m still nostalgic, but even a few elements of the movie ended up being better than the show which was more loyal to the books, which the movie was supposed to be more similar to before editing out the ending and chopping up the story to compensate. It was just a mess in post-production with New Line, I believe.

I loved the books in childhood, and I think the over politicization was unwarranted. Kids don’t pick up on the same themes and allegories, even if the topics are touched on. It’s fantasy, they see fantasy and art is always subjective. Some people are just looking for problems where there aren’t any.

As a Romanian, I am offended that Roma and Romanian people have been conflated into one and the same group of people in this video. You reach a wide audience, and it's clear that you put a lot of work and effort into your videos, so a distinction this simple slipping by and making it into the video was unexpected and is unfortunately continuing the negative stereotyping that Romanians keep having to fight, especially in western Europe.

I enjoyed The Golden Compass due to the fact that I watched it before having read (or even heard of) the book. I thought it was a super fun fantasy movie.

Then I read the book, and my god. I was flabbergasted and furious at how bad the movie was.

The bestest part of the whole trilogy was near the very start, when Lyra is playing with the Gyptian children and in a one-upmanship contest says something along the lines of:
Her uncle was captured by Samoyeds and told them to untie him or he would kill them. Then they untie him and he kills them anyways, just to teach them a lesson.
The exact kind of nonsense a child her age would say. I bought into her character (and the susequent trilogy) right then and there, simlly on the basis of those lines.

I'm 98% certain they just told Sam to be himself... either that or he wandered into set and just started being himself

i remember bring rwally pissed with the movie. the cgi was fing fantastic, the casting was superb... and then they butched the damn script so badly to neuter was Pullman was talking about

i've only read the first book (i think i just didn't have the energy to go on after all of that. "dark", my ass) but i like the movie. bc i'm obssessed with the concept of daemons and like daniel craig 😔 and the steampunk cowboy with a rabbit daemon is super fun
i wonder more about what my daemon would be than about my patronus

Would love to see a update video on the TV show, considering it fonished.

gypsies are not just romanian. there are in the world gitanos(spanish), russian, hungarian, english, etc gypsies. gypsies, or the rroma people, don’t come from romania, they have their origins in ancient india. the name rroma has no etymological connection with romanian; rroma stems from the indo-european language, romania comes from rome and the roman people, who conquered the dacian people, conquest and intermingling from which the romanians resulted.

How I love the parody songs

i would kill for the stoppard version of this film

Calling Paradise lost a book about Satan is pretty bad, not sure i wanna keep watching this

"...Circumstances involving... a ton of attitude..." - Well, Dom, while you are full of understatement, you have outdone yourself this time.

Also, an Armored Bear's armor is likened to a human's daemon in the book...

I have been extremely hesitant to watch the series (even though I was excited, at first) when I caught a preview of the scene where a certain baby was delivered to Oxford College... I'm sort of jaded by how inaccurate the movie was.

Guy adapted Paradise Lost into a humanist fairy tale for children where they kill god. The idea that someone could just sit down one day and do that makes me dizzy.

I'll admit I'm not a big fan of Phillip Pullman's writing style. At least in the Golden Compass. I could never tell what was going on. Can't say I found his book that impressive. His later works have been better though. Also, proud to be one of the few people to discuss the literary merit of the story and not the philosophical side.

My favorite book series ever, and this is a terrible adaptation, but i must admit i still enjoy the film

I absolutely loved this movie as a child it was so fun and magical.

I was so utterly pissed off when I saw they ruined the ending of the book for nothing. And from a marketing standpoint it's stupid too, Hollywood loves ending their big budget movies on a cliffhanger to generate speculation that there will be a sequel, but the one time they actually have a cliffhanger they don't use it.

algorithm boosting comment you say? mmmyes quite.

Dom, buddy, did you just list Svalbard as one of the differences in this universe? Svalbard exists, you know, it's in Norway.

Good gracious, Nicole Kidman.

I did enjoy the movie but got so angry when it ended, I immediately started googling and found out it's based on a book. All in all worthwhile experience.

I personally feel that the best book adaptions tend to be mini-series. Good Omens is one example. But another one is A Little Princess adaptation that the either PBS or BBC did back in the 90's. (Questar has this version on DVD.) Movies are just too short for very good adaptions, and TV series move off of the original plot quickly (not saying that is a bad thing just that it is what it is). Most mini series are still finite like the movie, but they have more time to explore the book. Also most mini series I have watched don't feel like they have to have a full plot in each episode, its just like an extended commercial break, you are expected to just come back. I just wonder your opinion on similar things.

It's been a number of years since I watched the movie. I liked the movie well enough. It wasn't so bad on it's own, but yeah, I don't remember it being so great. I do remember wanting to read the book because I liked the movie well enough (since 90% or more of the time the books are better than the movie). I unfortunately did not get through the book. It is very dense and I was going through some things in my life were reading something dense ... my brain could not work through it. I may try again here after the kids return to school!

Okay so you asked about viewers experiences with this movie/story, and I could talk for HOURS about this whole story so here I am.
I watched the movie (and I watched it many times at that) long before I read the books and loved it. I was probably around 10 years old, a huge fan of fantasy, raised on the LOTR and Narnia movies and this felt like an exciting and different kind of fantasy (I still really like how the movie represent the technology in the steampunk way it did). Looking back, I agree that many of the acting performances were underwhelming, though as a kid I had no grasp of acting/directing/filmmaking techniques and so I wasn’t fussed. As such, when I first read the books around 5 years ago, I held the casting from the movie as the characters I was reading and they worked really well. It took me a long time to adjust to the cast for HBO series, cause none of them fit right at first (some still don’t in my mind. I think most of the core cast did a great job but I felt that side characters like most of the Gyptians, especially John Faa, fell incredibly short in their portrayals of some really impactful and intimidating characters)
I just finished watching the HBO series last night and it was impossible not to compare it to, obviously, to the books as well as the movie, which I have not seen in years. Overall the series felt like a really good retelling of far more of the story than they could fit into a movie, and by season 2 I was properly invested. This comment is all over the place, but I felt like throwing in my 2 cents as this story means so incredibly much to me and I will always hold it as one of my favourite book series ever.
Now excuse me while I continue to cry over the ending yet again…

Pullman is not all he’s cracked up to be. He doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as C.S. Lewis.

Kidman and Elliot are the 2 things this movie did better. Kidman really captured the Mrs. Coulter that terrified me as a kid, and Elliot id WAY more "The Texan" than Miranda.

That said, the movie broke my heart. These were my favorite books as soon as I found the first when I was 8. The movie really was a letdown, save for those 2 perfect performances

The fact that both adaptations of HDM make the canonically dark-haired, black-eyed Lord Asriel brown-haired and blue-eyed is beginning to make me wonder if people think they need to do so in order to make canonically blue-eyed, blonde-haired Lyra make sense. And while I get that... I'm sorry, we have NEVER gotten a book-accurate Asriel and I am incredibly bitter about it. Give me the charming abusive monster who traumatized kid me, adaptations, I want to see the face of the man I despise!

I didn't have any experience with the book, so I kinda enjoyed the film. I liked the themes, and I'd not been exposed to them being done better already. I'm right there with you on all the criticism, though. Lot's could have gone better

I've always clumped together this film with Stardust as something that should've been better.

That ending song did it for me, this channel is a gem