In 2000 there was a film called Memento which told the story of a man who’d lost his long term memory and could only retain fifteen minutes at a time and yet was trying to find his wife’s killer. Oh, and the film was told backwards. If Christopher Nolan was able to make such a twisted story both cohesive and comprehensible, then how the bloody hell did Chris Weitz manage to make The Golden Compass so aimless and confusing? Granted, the film is based on the first in a trilogy of books by Phill Pullman, and so in the transition from page to screen some storytelling must be abridged. Not to mention that this film is intended to be the first in a trilogy of films. But even taking this into account The Golden Compass fails at structure, pacing and exposition.

The film is essentially a quest story about a young girl called Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) who gets given a compass which tells the truth and ends up going on a journey where some things happen and she ends up getting mixed up in some giant conflict between some people. It’s all rather convoluted and not too clear. It’s hard to explain why the storytelling doesn’t work without giving anything away, so instead I’ll use the Lord of the Rings as an example. The Lord of the Rings is also a quest film and one that works incredibly well. This is because the main objective is clear at all times: take the ring from point A to point B and dispose of it in the fires of Mount Doom. No matter what point in the plot you are at, there is always the knowledge that the ultimate goal is the destruction of the ring at a very specific location. Meanwhile the Golden Compass has no ultimate goal to keep your bearings by. There’s interweaving story details involving kidnapping plots, betrayal and scientific experiments, but none of it seems to mesh. There’s a difference between a mystery story and story that’s just baffling in what it’s trying to tell you. It doesn’t help that there’s also an entire fantasy world to comprehend.

The fantasy world is most simply described as being as post-steampunk parallel universe in which peoples’ souls reside externally in animal forms called dæmons which walk alongside their human counterpart. There’s also an oppressive government system called the Magisterium, some kind of mysterious and special particles called dust and several different factions and races in this world, including witches and bears. And yes, that is the most simple way of explaining it. While it is a genuinely fascinating world, there are just too many concepts that aren’t sufficiently explained. The Magisterium are supposedly evil and will-suppressing, but just what exactly what they do apart from get killed in fight scenes I’m not too sure.

Just compare at the government system in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil with the government in The Golden Compass. While you never quite understand the world of Brazil, you know enough by the way that innocent people are violently abducted from theirs homes and how office workers much share a single desk between two rooms that the system is frightfully wrong. You get no such sense in The Golden Compass; just vague indications that the Magisterium are bad and are up to something.

That said, the most prominent of villains, Marisa Coulter, is played by Nicole Kidman who is just exceptional in every way. Looking absolutely beautiful with a façade of elegance hiding her intentions, Marisa Coulter is the most intriguing and enchanting character in the entire film. Every single scene with Kidman in it is just amazing because the character has such a rich psychology and is one of those villains who are just so alluring, despite being evil. Really, the entire film should have been about the human/dæmon concept and Nicole Kidman because those are the two strongest elements of this film.

That said, this film is also visually striking. There’s a ridiculous amount of CGI with all those expansive environments and dæmon animals and it all just looks so impressive. The animal characters are convincing and feel as real as any human performer. It’s on par with the effects work in the Pirates of the Caribbean films where the composited CG elements are very rarely jarring and is easy to just get lost in the look of this fantasy world. I mentioned that the world is post-steampunk and what I mean by that is that the film has several visual elements of steampunk, but the machinery is powered not by steam, but by balls of energy encased in gyroscopes.

But while The Golden Compass may look pretty, I still feel that it doesn’t use visuals to explain story concepts enough. There are some nice touches, such as butlers and guards having dog dæmons. However, when it comes to actual storytelling, it all relies far too much on dialogue. There’s so many concepts that never get hammered home because they’re talked about, instead of seen. Worse still there is so much expositional dialogue that feels out of place, such as when Lyra is hiding in a cupboard when Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) walks in. She then says aloud: “that’s Uncle Asriel.” It’s blatantly obvious that this line is directed at the audience seeing as it is safe to assume that both Lyra and her dæmon already know who their uncle is. And yet the concept of dæmons, arguably the most radical of ideas, is the most comprehensible of all because it’s shown visually as well as explained verbally.

That said, it was quite clever of Henry Braham to reflect the storytelling in cinematography for the action sequences. What I mean is that (with the exception of a couple of scenes) the shots and the editing of most action sequences are disorientating. You’re vaguely aware that there’s fighting and yelling going on, but why that person fell over or how that person over there died is often difficult to discern between the disconnected shots.

Then there are several minor quibbles I have with this film. There’s the poor choice of lexicon for this world; dust is the key to the story, yet you can’t really take conversations about the science and mystery of dust seriously. Then there’s the sound design which just never seems to sit well with the visuals and lastly how the commentary on the Christian religious system present in the books has been toned down to be vague and infrequent for the film.

In the end, there are too many times where the story feels like it’s meandering or pointless and I found myself asking: seriously, where is this plot going? There’s no story arc, pacing or any sense of destination. It may have shiny visuals, Nicole Kidman being awesome and the very cool concept of having characters souls in animal form, but it just doesn’t make up for the massive amount of storytelling fail in this movie. It was better than The Chronicles of Narnia, but that’s not saying much.