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Golden Compass is quite fun to watch, with plenty of visual spectacle to marvel at along the way, but after being swept along you end up feeling a bit cheated. This is not to say I didn't like it, but that it was done for money, not love. It feels mechanical, like we're being force fed this universe of beautiful technology and garbled terminology without actually feeling anything.
The daemons are totally cool, especially Sam Elliot's sidekick, which gets far too little screen time. As for Zacharek's complaint that the polar bear is "the most believable of the movie's fake-looking talking animals" I'm a little confused. Beowulf's animation was too "real" and now the animation in Compass isn't real enough—you can't have it both ways.
Whatever. Compass will make a decent trilogy, but hopefully the sequels will be less constrained by the meticulous meddling of the money machine.
