If the conservative jackasses who are railing against this movie for being anti-Christian would spend a couple of hours and actually see the thing, they could immediately legitimize themselves and rail against it for a good reason: it sucks.

It's not so much that "The Golden Compass" is incomprehensible, it's just really not all that interesting or compelling and it's painful that it's apparently going to be the first movie in a trilogy. I feel like I'm stuck at a traffic light that's not going to change from red for awhile.

While librarians and bookstore owners are undoubtedly thrilled about the interest in reading produced by "Harry Potter" and all the subsequent books that rode its coattails to bestseller status, the resulting ideas are exponentially less interesting, kind of like that sci-fi theory that repeated cloning eventually results in DNA corruption. There's just a hollowness to it all. Let's see, there was Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and Rowling and how about some new fucking ideas, huh? Fantasy is so yesterday and I'm just sick as shit of wizards and talking animals and guys on horses swatting stuff with swords. You've read one, you've read them all. "The Golden Compass" is just a different acid-takers version of "The Chronicles of Narnia." "Eragon" was the worst of it, but "The Golden Compass" isn't much better.

The world of "The Golden Compass" is an alternate universe where things and names for things are basically the same. One big difference in existence is that every human lives side-by-side with their spirit or daemon, an idea that largely seems born out of the ability of CGI to depict such things. The main character is Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards) who discovers that kids are disappearing and is given a magical device by her uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) that allows her to know what's true and what isn't. It's a golden compass, sort of. In our world, it's called the Bible, bitch. She travels about, meets polar bears who wear armor, and eventually solves the mystery of the missing children.

Of course, this does little to explain the detail of the world of "The Golden Compass", but I have to say, I didn't really care. Everyone had a little animal that followed them around, bears talk - what more do I need to know? Being that this is a British creation, Sam Elliott as aeronaut Lee Scoresby does seem ridiculously out-of-place. It's kind of like having an opera interrupted by a guy pissing on the floor. Maybe Scoresby is an "aw, shucks" westerner in the book, but it still seems laughably miscast and I kept expecting Sam to break out a case of Coors and get Lyra drunk.

Ah, if only I had been drunk watching this overblown piece of fantasy dreck.