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This movie is the first installment of Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy. His Dark Materials consists of Northern Lights (titled The Golden Compass in North America), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. The first volume of the trilogy, “Northern Lights”, won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in the UK in 1995. The Amber Spyglass, the last volume, was awarded both 2001 Whitbread Prize for best children’s book and the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in January 2002, the first children’s book to receive that award. The series won popular acclaim in late 2003, taking third place in the BBC‘s Big Read poll. Considerable controversey has arisen over the making of this movie suggesting it is pushing an athestic agenda, probably because of Pullman’s criticism of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and their supposed religious agenda. Pullman in essence said of them, that for works that pushed a religious agenda that they lacked the one element, love, that is the foundation of New Testament Christianity. While I haven’t yet read the books, I will most likely do so now after seeing this first installment. In the movie, a teen girl named Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards) who lives in an alternate world where everyone’s soul is represented by an animal “daemon” discovers that things aren’t what they seem as friends of hers start disappearing, pointing to a plot by a group called the “Gobblers” lead by the beautiful but cold Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman). With a magical compass given to her by her uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), Lyra is led on an adventure to the kingdom of the bears where she teams with a group including the Armored Bear Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Ian McKellen) to find her lost friends. To go beyond this would spoil the movie for you. Suffice it to day, there are shades of Orwell’s 1984 and the epic battle of good against evil portrayed in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Throw in a little Harry Potter and you have a good two hours of fantasy entertainment. Taken at superficial value as a movie, I found it entertaining. You have to like this genre of movie to enjoy it, but it doesn’t tire you out, running at just under 2 hours. To keep you from being disappointed, I will remind you that this is the first installment of a trilogy, so don’t expect any resolution not should you expect all your questions to be answered. I don’t know if I would have been disappointed if I had read the books previously, but the movie definitely worth the price of matinee admission.