His Dark Materials
Cast: Dafne Keen, James McAvoy, Ruth Wilson, Lin Manuel Miranda
It’s quite ironical for a show so obsessed with souls to be born without one of its own; ironical and disappointing. Despite arriving in a post-Game of Thrones world and with HBO’s gleaming silver spoon in its mouth, His Dark Materials offers way less than what was expected. It’s an adaptation by numbers that gets the ‘epic’ part just right but it would be ‘fantasy’ to ask for anything more.
Watch the trailer for His Dark Materials:
Based on Phillip Pullman’s two-decades old trilogy, this is Hollywood’s second attempt at telling the story of one adventurous girl Lyra Belacqua (Dafne Keen) and her fantastical world. The 2007 film starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig was not warmly received either for the obvious reasons—it was not warm enough. While the visuals did take you into a grand and glossy another world and the actors slid into their roles as evil aunties and absentee uncles with ease, it failed to be more than the superficial sum of its parts. Shallow, unfeeling and quite frankly, a bore.
Almost 12 years later, HBO took the mantle to revive the story in the form of eight hours of television but having watched the first four episodes (made available for press preview) I am afraid history and Hollywood have simply repeated themselves. The extra hours could have been better used to give weight to these larger-than-life, made-in-a-mould characters, build more emotional links between them, explore the themes of theocracies and the human curiosity to understand the soul that it so boldly introduces. However, they are whiled away in episodes crowded with empty dialogue, action and its reaction.
And yet, none of the blame lies with the actors. The star of the show, Dafne held her own against Hugh Jackman’s performance of a lifetime in 2017’s Logan. She played a girl burdened with witless power and a heart too broken to hold it in check. But as Lyra, Dafne gets a lot of colour in her costumes and her personality. She gets far more than two lines to speak this time. She is brave and charming, she smiles and laughs, and is ever so optimistic even in the face of cruel guardians and disappearing friends. Why none of that makes you warm up to the character is something we will come back to later.
Lyra is an orphan who was chosen by the universe itself to rid the world of evil. She finds sanctuary in an educational institution and makes friends who band together to slay the jabberwocky. Also, there are witches and magical golden compasses involved. If it sounds more and more like the story of one particular boy who lived under the stairs, we won’t blame you for making that connection. But know that this where the similarities end.
Lyra may speak our tongue, live in a world that mirrors ours — geographically at least — there are still things that make it more ‘magical’. In this world, every human has a daemon, an animal familiar that is an embodiment of the human’s soul. The daemons follow their humans wherever they go and killing one would mean killing the other. Which makes it seem like quite the ridiculous choice to have your daemon be a butterfly, easily crunchable in a fist.
But this world comes with some ‘demons’ as well. It is ruled by a theocracy, a stand-in for the Catholic Church called the Magisterium. They are lifting up kids and their daemons to use them as lab rats. Providing more villain content is the charming and insidious Ruth Wilson as Mrs Coulter, the evil stepmother to Lyra’s Snow White. The perfect Disney villain but without the lime green ooze. Through her glaring eyes and thin, perfectly controlled mouth, she says the kindest things coated in layers and layers of scorn and greed. She loses control of her temper ever so often but the tears in her eyes or the regret and reflection that follows that episode of cruelty, makes you wonder what hurt is hidden beneath all that rage. However, when time comes in for the big reveal, the tragic backstory, it is told in such a dull and rushed manner that the only tragedy there is the death of your patience with the writers.
And that’s what it is. In the extra six hours earned by transitioning to television, the writers are still more occupied with giving a word-to-word, frame-by-frame recreation of Pullman’s world. Giving the story a new life, a reason for reincarnation gets lost in the noise of giant zeppelins and in the shine of mid-century modern furniture. Through the four hours I have viewed, someone cried about burying his own son, someone loses her child, someone finds liberation and someone recreates the whole Empire Strikes Back situation. But nowhere during all of this could I feel even an ounce of empathy for any of them.
The one and only moment of some substance arrives sometime in Episode 3 when Lyra talks to James Cosmo’s character about how she doesn’t want her daemon to settle on a form. She wants him to change however he pleases, free to be whatever he wants to be. On the other side, the old and greying Cosmo says with the regret of any old and greying man how he, too, wished his daemon and his soul could be free to do what it wished for but it’s okay, it’s something.
Maybe we were too hopeful and optimistic like Lyra. Too bad the show settled for an okay something.
His Dark Materials will premiere on Indian television on 24th November only on Star World at 9 PM
Follow @htshowbiz for more
