À la croisée des mondes : La boussole d'or

À l’ère de la Pottermania, ce film fantastique vraiment original voit le jour et peut sans aucun doute rivaliser avec tous les Harry Potter. Des ours polaires, des sauvageonnes, des Roumains, des cosaques… Tous ces personnages et, surtout, les démons créent une magie particulière et impressionnante. Daniel Craig et Eva Green sont à nouveau ensemble, même si on est loin de James Bond. :-) Dans mon euphorie, j’ai acheté les deux livres qui restaient pour compléter la série. Et j’espère que l’adaptation sur grand écran se poursuivra. (23/12/2007)

D'autres orgies numériques sans âme et avec des créations d'acteurs vides. Cela me rappelait le film La Ligue des gentlemen extraordinaires. Une magnifique mise en scène, des effets de qualité, une dizaine de stars du cinéma, mais captiver le spectateur par l'histoire - pas du tout. Et que fait Daniel Craig en position dominante sur l'affiche ? Une musique moyenne, Alexandre Desplat est un génie de l'émotion atmosphérique, mais la grandeur de l'aventure n'est pas dans son registre. (06/12/2007)

It really inspires respect when someone fails to make use of a high budget, a good story and an excellent cast. But Weitz is like a landowner's vain son, scattering his father's millions with girls of poor repute. The shady visual stinks of plastic and crayons, the pace of the film is terribly unbalanced and is constantly knee-deep in explanatory notes, and the acting stars are killed by failed directing. Yes, the kids are cute (like from a chocolate commercial), Kidman has charm (kind of like 150 similar sweet witches), the appearances by a bearded Bond and the cheerful cowboy from The Big Lebowski makes one happy, but solely because these guys have charisma regardless of the botched project. Weitz is reminiscent of a ninny who peeked at Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings before filming and then tried to do something similar. But this is a very poor substitute, given that there is nothing interesting in the entire film except digital messiness. Perhaps only occasional stirrings of sympathy for familiar voices and faces. Don't give this guy big budgets anymore - he's not even able to look after his own domain: dialogues and directing characters. (26/11/2009)

I know that objectively speaking this movie probably does not deserve that one star, but since I am so disgusted by this movie, l am going to take the liberty of rating it subjectively for once and award it the one star rating for Dakota Blue Richards, who was the only asset to this movie and managed to portray the character of Lyra mostly successfully. I have never been particularly opposed to changes in adapting books to the screen, so long as they make sense, are not arbitrary, and are beneficial to the movie. However, what the screenwriter and probably the producers have done here is downright worth a few hard slaps. To turn such a promising book series, which becomes more sophisticated and more thought-provoking with each installment, into an utterly pointless mishmash, which is clearly aimed at children and where a bunch of interesting ideas are buried or desperately underdeveloped – it is not worth anything but a good smack in the face. Especially the idea of the soul dwelling outside the body in the form of an animal – a daemon – is presented in a completely tragic way, the pace of the movie is downright deathly slow, most of the actors just recite their lines idly, the nonsensical changes compared to the original (why did they cut it off so awkwardly at the end?) and the already rather truncated plot is just tedious. No, I had better not go on listing everything that was wrong here, because it would go on for days. (17/08/2008)

Armored bear fights, flying wild sheep remembering brawls with sailors or kindly ladies with sadistic tendencies - that was too strong of a coffee and surprisingly boring at first. But when I accepted a year later that Compass won't unveil a magical fantasy, everything turned out much better in the end. I just start to regret that we won't see the continuation. The war with Azriel in the main role could have been a spectacular spectacle and a step in the right direction. (15/02/2008)