VIDEO: The trailer for The Golden Compass

Hollywood is, however, not eager to go where avowed atheist Philip Pullman has controversially gone before. Its title drawn from Paradise Lost, Pullman’s His Dark Materials children’s-book trilogy alludes copiously to Milton and Blake (his original title for the trio, The Golden Compasses, refers to the measuring instrument wielded by Milton’s God and Blake’s Urizen) as it fulminates against the deadening strictures of organized religion and every other kind of authority. In The Golden Compass, which is set in a parallel universe where Anglian children are disappearing, Oxford orphan Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) breaks away from Marisa Coulter (Nicole Kidman), to whom the university has entrusted her, and goes in search of the kids, and her Uncle Asriel, in the Far North, where she discovers that the Magisterium (Pullman’s version of the Church) is trying to wipe out Original Sin by separating each child from its animal dæmon, or external soul, before the child reaches puberty. It’s a parody of actual Christian theology (in particular the Incarnation), and if the Catholic Church chooses to recognize itself in it, and in Pullman’s cartoon-like representatives, that’s the Catholic Church’s problem.

Whatever its shortcomings, Pullman’s trilogy is a powerful, thought-provoking, one-of-a-kind original. Chris Weitz’s movie is standard-issue Lord of the Rings/Narnia children’s fantasy. Weitz — best known as the producer of, yes, American Pie — preferred his own screenplay to the one already embarked on by Tom Stoppard. (It’s not the first American muddling of Pullman: publisher Knopf renamed Northern Lights thinking that the “golden compasses” referred to Lyra’s truth-telling alethiometer.) And though Weitz’s script preserves most of the plot essentials (and some of Pullman’s lumpy exposition), the sensibility is soft and sometimes flabby. What edge there is comes from Brighton newcomer Dakota Blue Richards, tough and surly as Lyra, and Nicole Kidman (here so evil, she must think the Magisterium is a stand-in for Scientology), who in slinky white underlines the repressed sexuality of Marisa Coulter. Daniel Craig hardly registers; Eva Green as good witch Serafina and Sam Elliott as Texan Lee Scoresby are parentally reassuring — just what Pullman is not. Armored bear Iorek Byrnison looks good, but there’s too much calculation in Ian McKellen’s voice. (Why not Patrick Stewart?) Overall the film focuses on special effects (the dæmons are cute) at the expense of human interaction.

And then there’s the ending. New Line and Weitz didn’t want to deal with Pullman’s downbeat conclusion, in which Asriel tries to build a bridge to another universe at a terrible cost, so they postponed it to The Subtle Knife, putting the bear showdown (no bear-heart eating here, of course) before the Bolvangar blowout so that this Golden Compass could end with Lyra triumphant and flying off in search of Asriel (now identified as her father). That decision may save this film’s box office, but if the series means to achieve true Pullman, it’ll need a course correction.