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Originally Posted by marmalade  Og, have you seen any in-depth reviews or analyses? |
Yah: Joseph Campbell's book "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" :P
It was exactly star wars. They were the rebels against the evil empire who are trying to destroy all of the free thought in the world.
The little girl was luke skywalker with her connection to the "dust" that was the compass. She even met her pilot with a ship and his furry companion (han and chewbacca) who owed a life debt. Her "mother" was the evil villain's tool.
her friend who was captured is princess leia.
The demons are familiars just like R2D2 (for luke) and C3P0 (for leia). The kid even "flew into the death star" and destroyed it's "core" at the end of the movie. Her "mother" was incapacitated just as vader's TIE fighter was knocked out of the fight. She was separated from her escort at the end just as luke was and then they returned at the last moment to save her.. They even toyed with removing her familiar from her in that machine just as R2D2 was blasted in the back of luke's ship right before he accomplished his goal.
Etc etc etc..
I got a better appreciation for the role of familiars in these myths though. Thinking of the end of star wars when R2D2 was riding behind luke and C3P0 was standing beside leia and each one of them represented their companion (i.e. C3P0 was all about etiquette and protocol and R2D2 was a rebellious guardian angel).
And it's not just star wars. Star Wars is campbell's myth mapped into modern sci-fi in a post vietnam era concept when technology was just starting to really explode.
The matrix is that same thing in the information era as the Internet was exploding in the late 90s.. The golden compass is speaking specifically to the state of religious tyrrany just as 300 and other movies like it did the same thing recently in response to 9/11.
The story the golden compass presents is nothing new, but I thoroughly enjoyed the unique iconography and the explicit labeling of familiars as demons and the beautiful imagery that that represented. I also felt that there was much better character development in this show than there was in the recent narnia movie. The narnia movie just seemed like they were jamming the story down our throats. This one felt less rushed to me and more developed. Probably because there was one hero and not 4.