Not to say the books are no good, but the series always did give me a vibe of being written for the anti religion message rather then it merely being a theme if that makes any sense.

 

Wow, that really is great

I need this to be good.

 

Care to come down the rabbit hole with me for a bit? Because there's more here than meets the eye.

I've never really read the books as anti-religious. I actually don't understand why the story about them being anti-religious has gotten so much circulation, other than the fact that Pullman is loudly and publicly an atheist. They're definitely anti-church, but there's more to the story. And many of the things Pullman has said about his inspiration allude to that.

Pullman stated that he wanted to write a Blakean inversion of Paradise Lost, riffing on Blake commenting on Milton as being "of the Devil's party without knowing it." Pullman has explicitly said (witty bastard) that he is himself of the Devil's party and "does know it."

His Dark Materials as an inversion of Paradise Lost hinges on the key theme that the fall of man was actually a blessing. Innocence lost is a hidden good, a wound that is necessary for human life to flourish. (See the connection here to the daemons & Gobblers? In order to reach adulthood, to actively engage in life, innocence must be sacrificed. To resist this is perverse and results in catastrophe.) Pullman has explicitly drawn lines comparing this to the theological doctrine (popularized by Thomas Aquinas commenting on Saint Augustine) of felix culpa, or the happy fall - that God intended sin to enter the world, that he intended humanity to betray him, in order that humanity might be redeemed. For the Scholastics this is redemption through Christ, but it has metaphysical implications as well - that differentiated creation provides a necessary foreground for what is eternal to play against.

Pullman's sympathies are decidedly not with the Scholastic theologians however. He takes this to a literally heretical extreme, drawing inspiration from 2nd century Gnostic sects. Again, he has alluded to this influence many times. Not that he's a Gnostic, thank God...

In most Gnostic cosmologies, the Nous (or One) is betrayed by a Demiurge, a false God, which differentiates itself from the eternal Pleroma which a priori precedes being, and, having established cardinalities of space and time, proceeds to shroud Creation in sin. The Demiurge's true power derives from the One, which underscores all that is created, but the Demiurge, as an inherently wicked deity, demands worship, obscuring the true nature and origin of reality.

I know, that sounds like gibberish. Check out the wikipedia article if you actually care. (Honestly I think it's also pretty inadequate, but may give a better summary than I can.)

The Demiurge in Pullman is obviously the Authority, while Nous is the all-pervading force of Dust, which (it's heavily implied) does more than turn children into adults: it animates the whole of reality. (Think of the mulafa trees, and the currents of Dust which flow between worlds.)

This is all well and good, you say, but even if Pullman is drawing on all of this old heretical stuff the books aren't necessarily "Gnostic" books. And I would agree. (Also Pullman says they're not quite eloquently) Personally, I think the beauty of the books is that they are essentially humanist, and the question of God and his precise nature is less important to the story in terms of theme than the way in which we reach maturity. This is underscored in the narrative, where the children, still innocent, casually destroy the Authority when they lure him out of the crystal carriage, ostensibly to help him, because he was so ancient he looked like he was in pain. The kids literally kill God from compassion. They kill God because they recognize that even God does not want to exist, he wants to return to the transcendent Dust of which he is composed.

And then the actual climax of the book becomes a parody of Genesis, with a preteen make-out session and Lyra feeding Will berries.

Blake, Milton, and Gnosticism are all cited by Pullman as influences, but there's one much more obscure text he tends to talk about a lot, which I think puts forward the actual theme of the book in a better way than anything else. It's a short story by the German Romantic Heinrich Von Kleist, which he wrote shortly before committing a murder suicide in protest of the Napoleonic Wars. It's very short. Read it, it's beautiful.

TL;DR - Against Religion? No, more a subversive parody of Religion. The books themselves aren't necessarily atheist, even if their author is.

 

I remember reading a quote from Pullman saying that he wrote the trilogy for exactly that reason! I'm struggling the find the exact original phrasing right now, but his point boiled down to the fact that the Narnia books have some issues which we hand-wave away by being like "well, it was the past." But because kids are still reading Narnia today he wanted to make a contemporary counterpoint, very consciously designed as the "Anti-Narnia" as an antidote to some of those more troubling themes.

And yeah, the first Dark Materials book begins with Lyra climbing into a wardrobe and everything!

 

Taure, you just made me watch Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I... didn't know what I was missing out on.

If they can do His Dark Materials similarly, I'll be delighted.

 

I'm still not one-hundred percent convinced of McAvoy (he still seems young to me) and the bear with his armor looked a of. Other then that, looks pretty good.

 

The acting talent they've scrounced up for this is insane. That said, an entire season of Golden Compass material makes me cringe. Amber Spyglass and Subtle Knife arcs can't come soon enough.

 

Having only seen the 2007 movie, I think Craig looked better as Asriel, but I think that McAvoy is a better actor. Will watch this.

 

Having just finished listening to the audiobook, which had a phenomenal cast of characters, I can't imagine McAvoy as Lord Asriel.

He just doesn't have the sheer dominating presence of the character and the trailer doesn't convince me otherwise. Also, the ending where he plays a significant role really demands that presence of the character so eh. Iorek looks cool though.

 

I don't have massively strong feelings either way about McAvoy. I've liked him in most things I've ever seen him in, but he's not as big as I'd always imagined Asriel to be.

Iorek's face looks out of proportion - even if they were going to just have the panserbjørn just look like normal bears, his face doesn't look quite the right size?

The rest of the trailer looks good. I'm hoping it stays that way, although not sure how well the book well extend for a full season

 

Narnia dark

 

That movie was dark like Twilight was a dark romance.

Ruth Wilson looks goood.

 

His Dark Materials was one of the most impactful series I read as a child, and while I don't remember the specifics of what I felt, I still remember feeling very strongly as I finished it.

I've re-read it quite a few times over the years, and I'm excited for this. Here's hoping.

 

I was commenting more on the story and the universe than the movie itself, though I suppose I simply couldn't resist the pun.

 

A bit of necromancy for the thread as the first season will air soon. 8pm GMT this coming Sunday (November 3rd) on BBC One, with HBO airing the first episode a day later at 9pm/8pm Central. 8 episodes, presumably dropping every week.

I think I shall be rereading The Golden Compass this week.

 

Right, first episode aired, and it was... Perfectly serviceable, I guess?

Spoiler

Leading with the downside... The pacing needs to improve. I get that it's Lyra's Oxford, and that we've got other places to be, but there's a couple of times where it's like "I dun wanna" "you must" "okay". It was a tad jarring, and that, plus the lack of connection between the two threads of the plot (except for one inexplicable time when Lyra name-drops Billy Costa out of nowhere), are probably the biggest gripes I have with the first episode. Oh, and a couple of missing daemons, which are probably not in for CGI budget reasons.

Casting-wise, Lyra is good, with the level of mischief that you'd expect from the books. Will have to see how she manages later on, but so far, it's a pretty decent hit. Asriel is very different from my mental Asriel, but I think that the manic intensity is a valid replacement here. (And it's making me look forward to certain later events.) McAvoy works. Coulter so far seems like a full-on hit, Lord Faa is also extremely well-cast. Roger feels a tad weird next to Lyra - it doesn't really look like they're contemporaries - but that's just how stuff sometimes works at that age. Stick your head into a Y7/6th grade classroom once and you'll see what I mean. Ma Costa - as much as she really doesn't look like what I imagined - did sell the bereaved mother, and then some.

It'll be interesting to see what happens once the plot threads start intertwining and things shift North.

Music and visuals were good to excellent, got nothing to complain there. The intro is good mysterious whimsy musically, and with more references to later in the series than you'd expect from the season 1 opening and some lovely visual metaphors. I'm also not sure I'm ever going to get tired of rooftop scenes, but that might just be the Assassin's Creed player in me. Crypt was appropriately macabre.

I'm... Cautiously optimistic. Please don't fuck this up.

 

Spoiler

I'm the same position with this I was with GOT---never read the books. The only thing I have for comparison is the 2007 movie, and while I enjoyed the production value in this first episode, it seemed empty until Mrs Coulter showed up, and then she wasn't in it for long. All the stuff with Asriel and Coulter was good, everything else had the vibe of being unnecessarily stretched because they wanted to have the first episode end at a specific point and a premium show can't be 40 minutes.

Best shot of the episode was that massive interior in the Magisterium building, I liked the visuals in general.

 

Spoiler

I get that they didn't include background daemons because of budget reasons and so they wouldn't crowd the screen too much. But it still feels wrong to not see every human being with their own animal following them at all times. It's an important part of the setting that needs to be drilled into our heads, especially once we start seeing people who specifically don't have daemons right next to them.

Otherwise, I like it so far. I'm especially sorry I ever had any doubts about McAvoy, whose doing such a good job so far I can't wait to see more of him in certain scenes in the future.

 

Episode the second...

Spoiler

Ms. Coulter. Ms. Fucking. Coulter. Wilson is a monster in that role, on all levels.

Right, now that that is out of the way... Much better pacing than the first episode, though some problems remain. Could be a personal thing, but it was sort of unclear to me how long Lyra was in the apartment. Made the conflict between Lyra and Coulter a bit hurried, but easily enough handwaved by virtue of the latter gaslighting the shit out of the former, and the former wanting to find Roger. They do have good synergy IMO, and I loved the little interactions when Lyra went for a tall tale and Coulter just shut it down.

Not a lot of screentime for the Gyptians, that'll come soon enough. The Roger/Billy interaction in the Gobbler lair was by far the weakest part of the episode, but the letter writing scene was pretty good. (Thanks, again, to Wilson.) There'll be time to redeem the kid actors with some sharp-edged scenes later on.

The elephant daemon which is probably impossible and would, if it were possible, be very annoying in the room is The Window, of course. Slightly surprised they pulled the trigger on that this early, but there's sense in it, given how the start of Subtle Knife goes down. Someone on Reddit theorised that the man Boreal/Latrom met with has something to do with the SK start, but we'll see about that. He's got the look for it, if nothing else.