"The Golden Compass"

One day Lyra's best friend at the college, a kitchen boy named Roger (Ben Walker), mysteriously goes missing. In fact, everywhere, children -- particularly those of lesser means -- are going missing, much to the distress of their parents. Lyra wants to find Roger, but she becomes distracted and bedazzled by a glamorous woman who has shown up at the college, Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman), who offers to whisk her away on an adventure. Lyra is thrilled to go, but before she sets off, the master of the college (Jack Shepherd) gives her a mysterious object, a gleaming gizmo with dials and strange little pictures, which can be used, by those who know how, to divine the future and discern the truth.

There are other characters floating about here: Daniel Craig appears (only briefly, alas) as Lyra's explorer-scientist uncle, Lord Asriel; Sam Elliott turns up as a plain-talking Texas airman named Lee Scoresby (his expressive, lively face offers momentary relief from the movie's tedium); and Eva Green touches down, again, all too briefly, as a smolderingly beautiful witch named Serafina Pekkala. There's also a giant warrior bear, Iorek Byrnison (his voice belongs to Ian McKellen), the most believable of the movie's fake-looking talking animals: He's a soulful creature who has endured much suffering, although not as much as this movie puts us through.

Obviously, Lyra is going to go up against some pretty evil forces, and it's not hard to guess that the Magisterium is going to be one of them. The group exists, as one character puts it, to "keep people out of danger," but obviously, its real desire is to control them, and a mysterious substance known as Dust has something to do with its ability to do so. Because this is the first part of a three-part story, none of this is supposed to quite make sense, yet. Still, most of the significant plot movements and details are presented not as mysteries that will later become clear but as totally confusing stuff that just sounds silly and made up. The picture looks pretty enough in places: There are lots of '30s-style English interiors, rooms paneled in heavy, dark woods and hung with weighty drapes; and there are some sequences set in the icy, blue-white landscape of the frozen North -- the setting has a kind of forlorn beauty. (The cinematographer here is Henry Braham, although the movie does, of course, feature lots of computer-generated effects.)

But nothing that happens in "The Golden Compass" is particularly well dramatized, and because Weitz has tried to cram in so many details and plot machinations, there's never any time for relationships to develop between characters. Some of the performers seem to be struggling in nearly every scene: Richards is an appealing actress, but she looks lost here -- Weitz seems to have directed her to play the virtue of bravery instead of playing a person. And Kidman, here an unnervingly elegant-looking creature swathed in creamy white jersey and slinky golden frocks, plays Mrs. Coulter as a cartoon villain. She swans about like a drag queen in training. (Most of the villains here seem vaguely, or even overtly, homosexual, the old standby movie shorthand used to denote any sort of corrupting influence.) Her face appears to have been carved from a block of ivory; its aggressive serenity is creepy, and not in the good way.

Roman Catholics are worried that "The Golden Compass" will turn kids into little God haters. I'm more worried it will give them nightmares: There's a vicious fight between two armored bears, and a distressing sequence in which Lyra and Pantalaimon are separated and terrorized. Those seem to be the places where Weitz tried to preserve the gravity of Pullman's book, but he doesn't have the skill to make them mean anything. With his brother and directing partner, Paul, Chris Weitz has made some terrific pictures, including "American Pie" and "About a Boy." It's possible he just doesn't have a feel for fantasy. The movie's scale seems to have overwhelmed him: He has made a spectacle with no heart, no brains and no soul. All we can see is machinery.

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