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Hmmm. I'm really not seeing Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel. Not sure who i *would* cast for him, however, except possibly Christopher Lee about 30 years ago (which seems to be my answer for almost every casting problem at the moment)...
Kidman looks awesome, however (although i'm slightly annoyed that they changed the character's hair colour)... and, from the posters i've seen, the armoured bears will ROCK (despite the armour not looking exactly how i expected it to - a bit too intricate, IMO, whereas i imagined at least Iorek's armour as very rough, functional and kind of spikey looking).
I have trouble imagining what Hollywood would do with the second and third books - frankly, i'm not sure if they're filmable (except perhaps just possibly as anime). My suspicion is that they will cut out the whole Mary Malone/wheeled aliens subplot (which is, IMO, extremely different in tone from the rest of the books, reminiscent of a cross between Ursula Le Guin and CS Lewis's space trilogy, as opposed to the Alan Garner-meets-China Mieville vibe of the rest of HDM, and which i *really* can't see working in Hollywood film format - not even the look of the malefa(?)) and the "New Eve" thing, and possibly also the naughty stuff happening between Lyra and Will, and make up some other reason for Lyra's significance.
Of course, that would leave a huge gaping hole of what to do for the ending - but i suspect that Pullman's ending is far too depressing for Hollywood anyway, and might well be scrapped in favour of one that will allow for a series of "further adventures" (which would, of course, be awful beyond imagination)...
Or they might just not do the other 2 books - since the first one is relatively "safe" in terms of politically/religiously contentious issues (or, at least, probably not much "worse" than LOTR or Potter)...
It's worth noting, i think, that Pullman's trilogy can be seen as a kind of "post-Christian" response to the work of CS Lewis (both Narnia and the Cosmic Trilogy) - the latter of which, in turn, was a Christian response to the "atheistic" sci-fi of the likes of Verne and Wells. (Thinking the other day about one particular parallel between Narnia and HDM - one features a powerful, kingly talking animal who helps the child protagonists, but is infinitely spiritually "higher" than humans, being in fact basically a parallel-world version of Christ, while the other features a powerful, kingly talking animal who helps the child protagonists, but is less of a spiritual being than the in-universe humans, lacking both a soul and an afterlife, and thus being merely an animal with language and sentience - which, of course, is the author's view of the reality of real-life humans...)
I actually kind of like the name change from Northern Lights to The Golden Compass - that way all 3 parts of the trilogy are named after the artefact that plays a significant role in them, which gives it a better thematic unity IMO. (Although, of course, it is annoying that it isn't actually a compass.)
Bring on the bear-fights... |
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