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Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel

It might be unfair to compare and contrast this film with Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, but, well, New Line Cinema, the studio behind both films, has been making those connections in its own ads for some time now. (The fact that McKellen, who once played Gandalf, now appears as a mentor of sorts to Lyra, while Christopher Lee, who once played Saruman, has a cameo as one of the new film's Magisterial villains, also cannot help but bring the LOTR films to mind.)

So it is worth pointing out that Lyra goes on a journey of rescue and discovery that is not entirely unlike Frodo's, and she encounters a variety of places, people, and exotic cultures, just as Frodo did—but whereas Jackson let us bask in these new discoveries, writer-director Chris Weitz (making his first solo film after co-directing American Pie and About a Boy with his brother Paul) shows little interest in such things. Jackson created a world, but Weitz settles for setpieces.

The film races Lyra from one bit of jeopardy to the next, and she is usually bailed out by help that neither she nor we ever saw coming. At first this feels like a mere screenwriting cheat; when rescuers appear out of nowhere in one early scene and tell Lyra that they have been following her for days, you nod along even as you wonder why they didn't help her slightly sooner, when it would have been less dramatic.

Lyra meets with Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott)

But by the end, Weitz is staging these scenes in ways that simply defy logic. A wide shot shows two groups of people, lined up against each other on a wide open field of ice and snow, with Lyra and the leader of the other group standing opposite each other in the middle. A handful of closer shots show the leader of the other group preparing to attack Lyra. And then, out of nowhere, someone arrives to save Lyra, and he's standing right there and it's meant to be a surprise even though you'd think his approach might have been noticed by someone on either side of the battle.

Also noteworthy is how the new film begins with a bit of narration by a witch named Serafina Pekkala (Eva Green), which serves a function similar to that of the narration provided by the elf-queen Galadriel at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. Both of these characters are centuries old and can sense that a war is brewing which will bring the present age to an end—but where Galadriel mourned the passing of the past, Serafina looks forward to the future and to the "progress" it will bring.

And so we come to the film's treatment of religion. Serafina says the coming war—which, in the second and third books, is revealed to be a war against the Judeo-Christian God—will bring an end to "destiny" and establish a new era of "free will." What that means exactly is not spelled out, not in this movie, but we can get a sense of it from the fact that nearly all of this film's villains work for the church-like Magisterium, which spends much of its time "telling people what to do."

The filmmakers have been at pains lately to say that they toned down the book's anti-religious content, and that may be true to the extent that the movie never uses words like "church" or "God." But the word "magisterium" does refer, in the real world, to the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church, and the film is still peppered with religiously significant words like "oblation" and "heresy," as well as a cryptic reference to "our ancestors" who "disobeyed the Authority"—that is, to Adam and Eve and their disobedience against God in the Garden of Eden.

And when Iorek breaks into one of the Magisterium's offices to retrieve his armor, he bursts through walls decorated with Byzantine icons—a potent symbol of how the bear, Lyra, and others are fighting to liberate themselves from church rule. Weitz has said he wants to make the next films more "iconoclastic," so consider this bit of sacrilege a taste of what is yet to come—assuming New Line gets around to making the next two films in the trilogy.

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