the Golden Compass points to the thing your heart desires the most, an exit from the theater.

"The Golden Compass" promised much but definitely fell short even for a children's story. Like so many projects spawned in the dark annals of Hollywood boardrooms theses days, this script's inconsequential birth was poorly cloned from the bludgeoned vestiges of the classic works preceding it. Written with in a genre replete with masters of story telling, "Golden Compass" is nothing more than a trite pinchbeck of the more famous Fantasy stories written through out the years. The general consensus to date seems to be, take a horrifically obscene budget, cast a bunch of well known stars, hire one of the best CG animation studios and lastly have some studio writer pen some sort of script that can tie all of those elements together.
"the Golden Compass" was no exception. The cinematography and the CG effects were first rate, as was most of the acting. That's were any of the movie's appeal ended. The story was week and the direction lousy. Apparently in a parrallel universe each human is paired with an animal counterpart, a demon. The human and animal are bound together since birth. Since this is a fanatasy epic there has to be good and evil. The evil side in this boring tale would be the Magisterium, the ruling body over all things magical, basically an allusion to our own government. The forces of good lead by James Bond, I mean, Lord Asriel set out to seek a unique human at one of the polar regions who has dust flowing through him. Why dust, and why is it so important? Who cares just look at the shiny bright objects on the screen and the cute CG rendered animals. Some where in the debacle of a plot the bad guys hunt down the good guys, some polar bears show up to fight along side some witches and then the movie ends. The studio of course hopes you will want to actually go see the sequel to find out what became of the dust and Jame Bond, uh, Lord Asriel. Rent this for your kids but don't expect to get much more out of it than you would watching a "Curious George" cartoon with them.