New to DVD - 'The Golden Compass'

Enjoyable and smart but certainly not revolutionary, The Golden Compass is riding a wave of big-budget fantasy franchises that hope to find a young audience and sink their claws into them.

Unfortunately for The Golden Compass, it's riding that part of the wave that's about to crash into the reef.

Certainly not a bad movie - far from it, in fact - The Golden Compass suffers because of human nature; specifically, how can you not compare it to Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia?

It's by no means the amateurish ersatz of Eragon, and in fact, the script is better and more character-driven than Narnia, but we've seen a lot of talking animals and parallel universes in the past few years. Put it this way: If you had nothing but great steak for three straight days, you might want a salad on the fourth.

There are a lot of terrific things about the movie, however. Its script, as mentioned, gives a much more compelling sense of the immediacy of evil forces from the very early scenes. It requires zero effort to get sucked into the world created by author Philip Pullman. The anti-religion controversy the film has sparked can be read a number of ways, be it anti-establishment, anti-government, anti-group think, or yes, anti-religion.

The filmmakers said they eliminated a lot of those references that were more evident in Pullman's book, but you'd have no movie without the struggle of Lyra Bevacqua (Dakota Blue Richards) and Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) against the forces of this evil, no matter what you call it. So if you want to see an anti-religious undertone, it's not hard to spot.

More positives include the rather surprising amount of violence in The Golden Compass, which is appropriate given the tensions at the heart of the struggle, and the performances of Nicole Kidman, doing maybe her best work since Moulin Rouge!, and young Dakota Blue Richards, who creates one of 2007's best and most spirited onscreen inventions.

But because we've been down this road with franchises before, it's easy to spot the curves up ahead in The Golden Compass. Surprise is not a key element here. Neither is pacing or resolution. Knowing that we know it's not a standalone film, director Chris Weitz left loose ends at the conclusion of the film because he has two more installments to go. It can be pulled off, but it isn't here.