His Dark Materials

His Dark Materials is an TV adaption of a book trilogy written by Philip Pullman of the same name. The first book in the series Northern Lights was previously adapted into a movie The Golden Compass which I really liked as a kid, because it had armored bears fighting each other, and the rest of the universe aperently hated, because they decided to play things save by excluding the controversial religious theming and the actual ending of the book. The film underperformed and the planned sequels got canceled, leaving room for this new adaptation to be made by BBC.

ATMOSPHERE AND CINEMATOGRAPHY

Once again, I have to start by praising the tone set by the series. The world feels alive and vibrant, the special effects are of a good quality and we get many beautiful artistic shots (especially when focused on the characters – take for example the beggining of episode 7). In later episodes the atmosphere gets really dark, almost horror-like and the show hits that even better in my opinion.

DIVERSIONS FROM THE SOURCE MATERIAL

Unlike the 2007 movie, this adaptation doesn’t hold back its punches. It includes the anti-religious themes of the source material in full, maybe even placing bigger focus on them, than I remember from my childhood read of the series. The Magisterium really comes off as this despicable, villainous, controlling organisation, giving us a great „bad guy“ to root against. I have to say that I was disappointed by the daemons. They are human souls manifested as an animal and in the books they were some of the most interesting characters, but here they just have no personality (aside from Hester). Especially Pantalaimon became a non-character, which I was really sad to see.

ACTING, DIALOGUE AND PACING

This series has very interesting problem. It has great acting and not so great dialogue. I found myself liking almost every other aspect of the show and yet not really enjoying it, solely because of the dialogue, which feels really contrived and unrealistic at places, completely pulling me out of the story. The actors are doing everything thay can, but they just don’t have much to work with. There were only two performances I wasn’t fully satisfied with and those would be Lin-Manuel Miranda as Lee Scoresby (he’s just way too young for that role, Lee should be this old mentor figure, not a big-name star to steel the spotlight) and Lucian Msamati as John Faa (his performance just felt kind of emotionless to me). The bad dialogue almost made stop watching half way through the season, which would be a shame, because the second half was considerably better in my opinion, even though it had some pacing issues. The season has two climaxes (the Bolvangar episode and the final episode), in between which is only one episode, which makes the it feel rather boring and unnecessary. I would have liked, if they put the first climax earlier in the season or just had them back to back.

SUMMARY

In summation, the show hits all the technical aspect quite well, but the contrived dialogue considerably hindered my enjoyment of it, but the show started picking up in the later episodes leaving me cautiously hopeful for season two.