...And Then Mary Poppins Pulled Out A Shank

So I saw The Golden Compass a few weeks back, opening weekend, with the usual crew of miscreants and otherwise awesome characters. And of course, I come expecting a kid-oriented Lord of the Rings style movie, and I'm there for the fighting polar bears, hoping Daniel Craig will make it interesting.

Well, little did I know that Daniel Craig would barely make more than a few brief appearances, leaving the main characterly duties to some little girl I've never heard of before who is followed by an increasingly annoying shape shifting weasel with an inability to shut the hell up - think Navi from the Ocarina of Time, but slightly bigger. But at least I find that I was right about the child-orientation. It's very much a children's film, because no sane adult could possibly write this without a kid in mind. They hardly reveal any plot at all, they gather allies like they were a dime a dozen, and somehow this little girl is the only one who can figure out the relation of a series of three symbols on the stupid golden compass among a group of elders and leaders.

I digress. There is indeed a polar bear. He wears armor. He fights. He is Ian McKellan. WHAT?! How the hell did he not even get mentioned in the commercials? He was GANDALF. He's a big name in the fantasy/super hero deals. And he plays a much bigger part than Danial Craig, even without an actual appearance. Okay, so I've been entirely deceived by the cast. At least Nicole Kidman is really in it. That's the only thing they've been up front about. And Christopher Lee popped up, too, to further surprise me.

Anyways, back to the polar bear. He fights another polar bear, in a thoroughly satisfying yet oddly Simba v. Scar-esque fight scene. And then it happens. The atom-bomb of target audience eliminations. Gandalf the bear punches the other bear's JAW OFF. Clean off. And proceeds to bite him in the throat and smash him on the ground until dead. So much for a flippin' kid's movie.

But then we plunge right back into the mostly childish stuff, and close with a large, kind of ridiculous battle with flying archers and machine-gun toting Russians with wolves.

Of course, this isn't the first time I've seen this kind of thing recently, nor will it be the last, I'm sure. Ghost Rider, of course, could have been fantastic if they could have simply accepted that the comic itself had very dark themes that they'd need to keep consistently. Of course, some genius decided it was a comic book movie so they had to keep things a bit more family oriented. Awesome. Let Nick Cage fight the devil's son, but let's not be too scary. Yeah. Great idea.