I’ve been busy for a bit, and away from the blog, but surely it’s not Christmas already? Only look at this fantastic present the BBC have wrapped up for us! I’m desperate to open it but, filled with joy and trepidation in equal parts. The trilogy of books by Philip Pullman that make up His Dark Materials are so fascinating and such a complicated series, beloved by so many people and previously badly mishandled.
I didn’t hate the 2007 film The Golden Compass but it’s fairly clear where they went wrong, and I’m sure those pitfalls have been much fretted over by screenwriter Jack Thorne ahead of this adaptation. As a Hollywood product it understandably shied away from the religious criticism central to the storyline, trying not to offend the Catholics. It was further neutered by its Young Adult category, and worries that a close adaptation of the book would scare the children, and the shareholders. It suffered brutal rewrites and reshoots like botched cosmetic surgery, so it no longer looked anything like the original concept. Worst of all, because it was a film, it had to come in under two hours in length. Basically it was savaged in production and then, predictably, by the critics. There was no hope for the rest of the trilogy, until now. Can His Dark Materials catch a breath stuck under the collective weight of our expectations?
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