Friday, December 07, 2007

The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass is a new children's movie based on a book trilogy called "His Dark Materials" by Phillip Pullman. Normally, I don't like warnings about books or movies. It was interesting to read the Davinci Code. The holes in the logic seemed obvious, not necessarily the history or the plot, but that sex is at the core of life as opposed to God. It seems the same is true in The Golden Compass.

In a telling and pivotal moment in the series, a former nun named “Mary Malone,” who is a central character, poignantly reflects upon her realization that God does not exist: “There’s no one to fret, no one to condemn, no one to bless me for being a good girl, no one to punish me for being wicked. Heaven was empty. I didn’t know whether God had died, or whether there never had been a God at all.”

...

Still, like so much else in our culture, Pullman’s aversion to God would appear to boil down to sex. Mary Malone explains that her desire for sex was her primary purpose for abandoning the God in whom she no longer believes. “And I thought: Am I really going to spend the rest of my life without ever feeling that again? And I took the crucifix from around my neck and I threw it in the sea. That was it. All over. Gone. ... So, that was how I stopped being a nun,” she recounts.


The problem here is that these are children's books. I might let my teenage children read them, but they would need to know what they were getting into.

I have a feeling (and I haven't read the book nor seen the movie) that the movie may just be very adventuresome. I have heard that it is the least offense of the three books. But it does feel like an odd place to be placing our children's thoughts. I wish they would have made a better Eragon movie.

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