It’s spelt-with-a-capital-letter Dust, and it’s comprised of mysterious elementary particles from other worlds (thank you, almighty Wikipedia) – and this is the sort of thing a book is so much better at elaborating than a film. Very early in the film, as Daniel Craig exclaimed, “Dust is flowing into this man,” and Derek Jacobi wondered if we can “protect our children from the corrupting influences of dust,” and a few others launched into much eloquent waxing about “dust this” and “dust that,” I was half-tempted to stop the screening and ask for a show of hands to verify that I wasn’t the only one who felt I’d mistakenly wandered into a big-screen commercial for high-end vacuum cleaners.īut this dust, you see, isn’t simply dust. This, surely, is how they’d have felt, the way I did thanks to my unfamiliarity with Philip Pullman’s literary universe – ears numb from the constantly unravelling yarns of exposition, brain tired from trying to keep pace with the goings on, and eyes glazed over from the ton of visual information destined to make full sense only to long-time readers and fans.
– EXITING THE PRESS SCREENING OF THE GOLDEN COMPASS, I was engulfed by waves of empathy for the brave audiences that had not read the Harry Potter books (or the Ring trilogy, for that matter) and had, nonetheless, opted to experience the cinematic adaptations. There’s very little wonder in the first installment of a wannabe fantasy-adventure series.
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