To deviate from the text probably puts the filmmakers at peril with that built-in audience, while in this country at least, where the books are less well known, the filmmakers have the added burden of explaining to everyone else how this parallel universe works. They’re actually brainier and better written, but they’re like the Potter books in that readers tend to feel about them not just fondness but also something like proprietorship. Pullman’s novel, a book for young adults, is part of a trilogy called “His Dark Materials” (the title comes from Milton’s “Paradise Lost”), and in England, where they were first published, all three books are often compared to the Harry Potter novels. There are witches, armored bears and a glamorously wicked mother figure (Nicole Kidman, looking like a Botoxed Marilyn Monroe). It relies on a technique that Dennis Gassner, the production designer, calls “cludging” - marrying the familiar with the fantastic - to track the story’s protagonist, an impish pre-teenager named Lyra Belacqua, on a journey from Oxford College to the Arctic Circle in search of her own identity and of some children who have been kidnapped and transported to the North for hideous experimentation. The project nearly crashed at least once, while burning through $180 million, and it is unclear what audiences will make of such a craft, which is at once high-tech and deliberately old-fashioned. Landing the movie in theaters, where it will open Friday, was not unlike inflating and then piloting one of these exotic, cumbersome airships. PHILIP PULLMAN’S novel “The Golden Compass,” the basis for the new movie of the same name, is set in a parallel universe that runs on something called anbaric power instead of electricity, and where people travel in hot-air balloons and enormous, slow-moving zeppelins.
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