Plenty to love about the movie – Beautiful daemons, inspired casting and design of the Gyptians, Elliot’s Scoresby. Yes, it lacked some grit.īut it was also sumptuous, transporting and full of some great performances.! I’m one of the (seemingly) few people who actually actively LOVED the movie.

Still, the movie has its fans, although even they’re not deaf to its flaws: Indeed, the original movie was criticized for being undercooked and for cutting out a lot of the anti-authority sentiment that made Pullman’s novels stand out among other, tamer young adult novels of the time. The cast did “the best that could be done with the time they had.” That sounds like damning with faint praise to me. A magnificent cast, among whom Dakota Blue Richards shone like the polar star, did the best that could be done with the time they had, which simply wasn't enough. So in hindsight, how does Pullman feel about The Golden Compass? The English author shared his thoughts on Twitter, the best worst discussion forum the 21st century has to offer:ĭelighted as I am with the TV adaptation of HDM, I don't want to be too critical of The GC movie. If sequels were planned, they weren’t made. That movie, The Golden Compass, featured heavy hitters like Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, but it tanked critically and was a solid “meh” at the box office. The first book in Pullman’s series, The Northern Lights, was adapted as a movie in 2007, back when studios were trying to chase the success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy. But the new show is happening in an era when Game of Thrones has proved that there’s a market for longform fantasy stories on TV. Without getting too lost in the weeds, we can just say that His Dark Materials is a meaty, interesting read, and that so far HBO and the BBC are committing to adapting it faithfully.

A children’s series with an anti-establishment bent, His Dark Materials follows Lyra Belacqua, a precocious young girl who lives in a world very much like our own, only there are a lot more steampunk influences, everyone has an animal familiar called a dæmon, and there’s a tribe of talking fighting bears. HBO and the BBC have teamed up to adapt Philip Pullman’s beloved fantasy series His Dark Materials for TV.

His dark materials books in order