I’d tried to read The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman at an earlier date on the recommendation of a friend. I just couldn’t hammer my way through it. The prose seemed too dense, or the pacing was too slow, or there were too many things coming at me at one time. Whichever it was, I put the book aside.
I never found out that one of the characters was an armored polar bear that was a king who’d been kicked from the throne. I didn’t find that out till the trailers started airing.
Then, while in San Diego at ComicCon, I ran across the huge display they had up for the movie. I gawped. I don’t often get to write that word, but it’s the only one that fits when you turn a corner and run into a gigantic polar bear nose-to-nose.
So I was a tad more curious. Then my 10-year-old started seeing the trailers and I found out what the polar bear was all about. And we saw the trailers in the theater. I was blown away. The hook had been set and my appetite thoroughly whetted.
A few days before I went to see the movie, I heard there was an anti-Christian theme tied to it and a lot of people were going to boycott the film. I was really curious at that point. I’d expected a lot of fallout over The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, but people seemed to be okay with that.
Anyway, I tend to make up my own mind about such things. So I went.
I had a blast. So did my son. And I didn’t see any anti-Christian themes in the movie. Sure, the Church was kind of represented as the bad guy, but only if you think that was your church. Dan Brown did a lot of church-bashing in his book, The Da Vinci Code, which was way more edgy in my opinion.
I chucked any theological assumptions at the door and just enjoyed the computer-generated imagery, fantastic characters brought to life by exactly the right mix of actors and actresses, and had a grand adventure in a world that was brilliantly different than my own.
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