The Golden Disaster

The Golden Compass, the first in His Dark Material Trilogy by Phillip Pullman, was recently made into a movie, starring a bunch of big named actors and actresses, including Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig.

The book, if you haven't heard of it, is amazing. All three of them are actually. They're set in a sort of other world, thats kind of parallel to ours, except there, our souls are outside our bodies and take the shape of animals. The souls are called Daemons.

The movie does not esatblish this, which to anyone who hasn't read the book is very confusing. Why are there talking animal beside people? Why is that leopard not eating the guy, but instead having a conversation with him?

The acting isn't terrible, but if no one has any idea what's going on, I highly doubt that people will care weather or not the acting is good or bad.

Here's the trailer:

It's sad when you can understand more from the trailer than the movie. The movie would have been good, but nothing during the movie was really explained that well. Needless to say, the two other parts of the series most likely wont be completed. But really, read the books. They're worth the read, the movie definitely not. But you can't win em all.

A really big difference, one that bothered me was that there was this boy, a friend of Lyra (the main character), his name was Billy Costa, they combined him with another character. Here's the thing, that would be fine if it wasn't the whole fact that one lived, and one died. They killed this character that was supposed to live and return to his family. Unnecessary.

The movie also bounces around the settings waaaay too fast. I understand time constraints, but they could have at least pretneded that this took days, instead of seconds.

Anyways, obviously the book is better than this movie.

Books: 8     Movies: 2

Going the Distance

Disney's Hercules, a fantastic movie if I do say so myself, is a story that is loosely (let me stress loosely) on Hesiod's Theogony.

Obviously there are some major differences, such as the the Theogony mainly talking about Zeus and the births of the gods. Also, that Hercules is called Herakles and doesn't really ever turn mortal, although it is referened in the line, "Blessed is he! His exploits all finished, he is now among the gods, griefless and ageless forever." So maybe there is the possibly a chance he wasn't always immortal? I'm not sure. I'll probably have to look more into that.

Basically though, the Theogony isn't really a book that should be made into a childrens movie if they're going to be exact. It's very graphis,  I guess you could say, considering Zeus swallows his children a couple of times... and also because most of the epic talks about giving birth to different gods. SO. It was very necesary to change it, although Disney changed it a lot.

The similarities though are that a problem arises between the current gods, such as Zeus, Hera, Hermes, etc, and the Titans (who are actually older gods, not giant monsters). But in order  to defeat the Titans, Zeus uses lightnening bolts and the powers of the Earth to defeat them.

In the movie, Hercules, Zeus ends uip failing and Hercules has to save them. It is possible though that Hercules is a continuation of the Theogony, where the Titans escape from their prisons, although at the time that would happen, Hercules is actually already a god and married to Hebe.

Either way though, the movie isn't really accurate, although it does introduce children to a different, ancient culture and their gods.

Upon comparing the two, it is a reach to say that Hercules is Theogony, but it is based off of it, very loosely based off of it, although it is widely different.

Since the movie incorporates fantastic music such as:

and:

Even thought the poem is very good, well the translation I have read is, it just isn't the same as Hercules and the music and Disney's very inaccurate rendition of it.


So i the end, I'm giving the win to Hercules even though it's very inaccurate.

Books: 7     Movies: 2