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openspace4lifeNote to Philip Pullman fans: Quibble all you like about the strange rearranging of the plot in the new Golden Compass movie, or the unnecessary renaming of the polar-bear king from Iofur to Ragnar--but please don't complain so much about the lack of overt religious references. Rest assured: in this movie, religion is still the bad guy. It's a thinly-veiled allegory instead of a direct statement, yes, but if that counts as "taking the heart out of it, losing the point of it, castrating it" (as claimed by the National Secular Society), then the makers of the most recent Chronicles of Narnia incarnation must have done the same to their source material by failing to say outright that Aslan is actually a parallel-universe Jesus.
The key to decoding The Golden Compass movie's Magisterium/Authority is the use of the word "heresy," which as everyone knows is most commonly used in a religious context. Given this clue, it becomes easy to recognize the cathedral-style architecture of the Magisterium HQ and the cross that's clearly visible in the Magisterium sigil. The more clever members of the audience will see straight through the awkwardly-phrased line about how "some of our ancestors disobeyed the Authority, thus bringing the evil Dust into the world." And anyone who wants clinching proof need only spend a moment on the Internet to find out what the word "Magisterium" actually means. With that last bit of information in hand, the fact that the script takes pains to avoid saying the word "church" starts to look just plain silly.
Anyway...how about environmental themes in the movie? Well, it does include plenty of free publicity for polar bears, but "Iorek is drowning" doesn't really work as an anti-global-warming slogan. I mean, the guy lives in a parallel universe where, if anything, the problem seems to be too much cold. But how about the idea of daemons, which in my opinion is the coolest thing about the whole story? Doesn't watching all those little critters scampering and flitting around the human characters make you want to live in a green-built community that attracts wildlife rather than repels it? ...Okay, maybe not, but I had to try.
The key to decoding The Golden Compass movie's Magisterium/Authority is the use of the word "heresy," which as everyone knows is most commonly used in a religious context. Given this clue, it becomes easy to recognize the cathedral-style architecture of the Magisterium HQ and the cross that's clearly visible in the Magisterium sigil. The more clever members of the audience will see straight through the awkwardly-phrased line about how "some of our ancestors disobeyed the Authority, thus bringing the evil Dust into the world." And anyone who wants clinching proof need only spend a moment on the Internet to find out what the word "Magisterium" actually means. With that last bit of information in hand, the fact that the script takes pains to avoid saying the word "church" starts to look just plain silly.
Anyway...how about environmental themes in the movie? Well, it does include plenty of free publicity for polar bears, but "Iorek is drowning" doesn't really work as an anti-global-warming slogan. I mean, the guy lives in a parallel universe where, if anything, the problem seems to be too much cold. But how about the idea of daemons, which in my opinion is the coolest thing about the whole story? Doesn't watching all those little critters scampering and flitting around the human characters make you want to live in a green-built community that attracts wildlife rather than repels it? ...Okay, maybe not, but I had to try.
