While I was down at my Dad's over the Christmas holiday we watched this.
I've got to say it was pretty poor in my opinion. The problem - and I find this very odd given it's based on some very popular books - was that it was very poorly written.
It kept making the classic error of telling us stuff and not showing us, which is a horrible mistake for a film to make, especially. The whole ethos of show don't tell is because of movies and they effect they've had on us all.
There were some striking examples of this. In one scene the main girl, Lyra, goes and find these two young boys in a hut in the middle of a snowy-waste. Now how the hell these boys got there we don't know and the cardinal sin comes later. A nurse explains that the boys escaped, but we never see.
Okay, so maybe we didn't need to see it before Lyra finds them, but a quick flash to the boys escaping when the nurse said it would have sufficed, but we didn't get that either.
And that was just one small example - there were loads of things we should have seen (probably in cutaways) rather than characters telling us.
But there was another problem: dust. In this world, "dust" is a bit like a catch-all pseudo-religious thing. The problem is I dunno if you've ever seen Little Britain, but dust is kinda a comical word for me from that series.
It's also a bit confusing - dust is dust as well as being mythical dust :/. Couldn't they have had a better name?
The only really good part was to do with the polar bears, which was quite a well realised sub-plot. It also had some really great CGI effects. So great that, slightly ironically, the fake polar bears actually seemed a bit more real than the human characters.
Sorry, that's a bit harsh, but I have to say the cap to the poorness of the film was that the performances weren't all that great. They sort of seemed a bit pedestrian - a bit plodding where they should have been more up-beat and had more oomph.
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