Review: His Dark Materials (Jack Thorne, 2019)

Once upon a time, years ago, Philip Pullman was watching television. More specifically, Pullman was watching a televised interview with Richard Dawkins, who was talking about fairy tales. Suggesting that fairy tales are ‘anti-scientific’ and potentially ‘pernicious’ because they promote irrational faith at the expense of healthy scepticism, Dawkins questioned whether children should be reading them. Being a writer of fantasy stories for children, Philip Pullman objected. In a passionate essay titled ‘Imaginary Friends,’ Pullman argued that fantasy is quite different from faith. The makers of His Dark Materials the TV show would have done well to keep Pullman’s distinction in mind: the show is so focused on staying faithful to Pullman’s novels it forgets to play make-believe and have fun with its source material. The result is a decent, if somewhat dull adaptation, which never quite manages to immerse viewers in Pullman’s fantasy world.

Fig. 1 - Still from His Dark Materials (Jack Thorne, 2019). Lyra (Dafne Keen) suspects that something is amiss.

The show opens in the England of a parallel universe, which is dominated by a villainous religious organization called the Magisterium. Guided by religious dogma, the Magisterium supresses scientific discoveries and enables the abuse of children, all in the name of fighting heresy. With its muted colour scheme and its focus on plot at the expense of world-building and atmosphere, the show takes Pullman’s books as seriously as the Magisterium’s priests and cardinals take their own holy scriptures. This is a problem. As Pullman points out in ‘Imaginary Friends,’ faith thrives when its tenets are simply accepted, but fantasy differs because it encourages creative liberties and is more akin to play-acting than to belief. Pullman illustrates this point in his essay when he recalls how, as a child, he would join his friends in acting out adventures based on their favourite fictional stories. Firing imaginary muskets and clutching at phantom wounds, Pullman and his friends never actually believed in the dangers they fought. But their feelings, as they played, were real enough: ‘I felt,’ Pullman recalls, some small ‘scrap of heroism,’ some sense of ‘what it was like to be brave and to die facing overwhelming odds. That intensity of feeling is what both fuels and rewards childhood play and reading alike’ (Pullman 309). If reading fiction, as Pullman suggests, is a form of playful, imaginative immersion, then I suggest that the same is true of viewing fiction – and viewing fantasy fiction, in particular. 

Consider the Harry Potter films: For all their many sins (oh, how they butchered Rowling’s plotlines!), the films nonetheless managed to convey a sense of wonder through their use of sound and image. Filmed from a low angle as he confiscates letters from Hogwarts, Uncle Vernon looms as large for audiences as he does for 10-year-old Harry, and viewers can pretend, just for a moment, that our own Hogwarts letters were simply intercepted, and that magic does exist in our own world, hidden in plain sight. In many ways, His Dark Materials the TV show does the exact opposite of the Harry Potter films. The show is marked by a lack of audio-visual playfulness, an unwillingness to imaginatively interpret the rich source material, in order to bring it to life. For instance, in Pullman’s books, the heroine Lyra (Dafne Keen) spends weeks in the luxurious apartment of a key antagonist. At first, Lyra trusts the apartment’s owner. But the longer she lives there, the greater her unease (Fig. 1). The show could have conveyed Lyra’s mounting fear through eerie music or sound effects, or through unsettling camera angles, or through montage, or any other cinematic technique. Instead, Lyra simply states how she feels, and the apartment looks every bit as comfortable as Pullman describes. We do not feel uneasy there. Us viewers aren’t allowed to play along.

This is a pity. Lyra’s world lends itself beautifully to audience immersion. In her universe, every person has a daemon, which is their soul personified as an animal companion. Given that characters move between universes, there is so much potential to trip viewers up, to lull us into thinking that we are watching our own world, only to notice, with a shiver of delight, that a scruffy pigeon, or passing dog, is in fact somebody’s daemon. Such playfulness with visuals is never entertained. Instead, whenever a deamon is on screen, this is always immediately obvious. The CGI is, of course, impressive: it is a joy to watch Mrs Coulter’s (Ruth Wilson) golden monkey leap and screech, or Lord Asriel’s (James McAvoy) snow leopard yawn, like a great sleepy kitty. On set, puppets were used to help the actors interact with their characters’ daemons (Fig. 2), and these puppets were later replaced by CGI (Fig. 3). As Jane Tranter, executive producer of the show, explains in a behind the scenes feature, it was generally accepted that the daemons had to look ‘photo-real.’ Yet animation with such loving attention to detail obviously costs time and money. The sheer ‘volume’ of the animals that had to be brought to life was ‘a worry,’ according to Russell Dodgson, the show’s VFX supervisor. This may explain why people in the background often appear to have no daemons at all, and why crowd scenes are so curiously devoid of animal life.

Fig. 2 - The puppet that was used to stand in for Mrs Coulter's golden-monkey daemon on set.

Fig. 3 - Still from His Dark Materials. The golden-monkey daemon.

I question, however, whether every single daemon really needed to be created through visual effects? One supporting character has a cat for a daemon. Wouldn’t it have been easier and cheaper to just place a real tabby in the room? Instead of daemons being simply left out to cut costs, real dogs or roosters or horses might have populated the background on occasion, to help preserve the verisimilitude of the story. Taken straight from Pullman’s wonderful books, this story is, of course, engaging. The casting of the show is furthermore very well done. Ruth Wilson in particular impresses as the ruthless Mrs Coulter, and the show is at its best when she’s on screen, making throwaway lines from the script instantly memorable, or monkeying about in silence on her roof-top, while her daemon looks on.

All things considered, His Dark Materials is a fine adaptation. But it squanders so much audio-visual potential that it never manages to be any better than just fine.

References

Pullman, Philip. “Imaginary Friends – Are Stories Anti-Scientific?,” Daemon Voices – Essays on Storytelling (Oxford: David Fickling Books, 2017), 305-315. 

Biography

Lisa Feklistova is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Cambridge. As a child, she worked as an accredited Young Journalist for the Berlin Film Festival, and has been in love with the screen (big and small) ever since. She holds an MA in English Literature and Film & Television Studies from Glasgow University, and is keenly interested in how literature intersects with various forms of visual culture.