My wife and I (and our former group of game-of-thrones watching friends) just finished watching the whole series, and the pretty universal reaction was… meh.
They were all trying so hard. The acting was good. The cinematography was good. And yet… we found ourselves just not really caring.
I think it did a VERY bad job of world-building. I’ve read the books, but long enough ago that I forgot many of the details, and I found the details of the world just not well-explained, and not hanging together well. Which, frankly, might be a weakness of the books as well, but one that’s easier to gloss over in book form.
Then I think that it is pretty much time for you to pull the plug and not bother with the rest of the series–it isn’t for you. (Same goes for the books–they work the same way–an odd setting that is slowly made clear throughout the book, just like vast amounts of other fantasy/SF.)
I got curious about how far it is into the book before the nature of dæmons was discussed, and did a key-word search for “dæmon” on an ebook of The Golden Compass. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t discussed at all, they were simply taken for granted. The closest it got to being philosophical about them was when a certain someone said to Lyra “A (deleted for spoiler)’s armor is his soul, just as your dæmon is your soul.” It isn’t until in the second book that the idea that it was anything than the normal order of things is even touched, they are just matter-of-factly there–the first book was all fish, so no reason to bring up water. The show managed to briefly touch on the subject in the first season only because it blended elements of the second book into the first.
Why hide that? Why is it a spoiler? It was in the dialogue of the very season we are discussing. Everyone who is talking about their thoughts about this season am has heard it.
That’s fine, and I’m sure it works perfectly well in a book. A purely literal medium gives you words and nothing else. There is nothing else to distract or inform whereas a visual medium may also rely on sets, sounds, editing, framing and acting etc. to make a point and if it is not done well those can confuse rather than inform. What one element suggests can be conflicted by another.
e.g. everyone having an animal companion, even with little explanation, is not confusing by itself. However, making the point that everyone has them creates the expectation that you will see everyone with an animal companion and when you clearly don’t, that is a confusing point. In a book however, your mind will create a world that is a constant swirling menagerie. Same with the animal speech. On film, where every voice tends to have a very obvious source it seems clumsy at best to not make sure that the same is true for the animals. Same with the changing “form” it was confusingly introduced on film in a way that is not a problem in a book. In one scene the ferret is one colour, in another it has changed and we wonder if they are talking to another daemon entirely.
I’m not going to dissect every issue, the above are all to do just with the animals but they are indicative of a clumsiness in general that made it very hard to follow. Any of those elements in isolation (or even a few) are not a problem if the world-building is done well in general as you trust in your understanding and can devote brain time to pondering those mysteries.
Having* too many* of those elements, badly handled, all at one time is a problem without prior knowledge of the material.
I think this is one of those rare occaisions where the series needs to be extended. I’m on record of bemoaning the fact that often producers will spin out a thin story (or no story) when they clearly don’t know where they are going. In this case there is a very clear arc to complete and it probably needs to go much slower in these initial stages in order to keep viewers engaged, keep them watching and then allow them them to move faster later on.
Yes, I posted my history with this series earlier in the thread. I watched the Golden Compass, then I read the three books, then I pretty much forgot all the details until I started watching this series.
The series has its faults–I haven’t decided for myself whether I think it’s actually good, but I don’t think that the lack of explanations in episode 1 is one of its faults.
No, lack of explanations as such may not be a fault but I just don’t trust the show that it is leaving things unexplained through conscious choice rather than a poor adaptation.
I guess I’m disappointed because it looks so good and it should be my thing. There is also a “war of the worlds” adaptation on the BBC and I may give that a whirl instead and perhaps try watching the first episode of HDM again with headphones and no-one else in the room.
Did you ever consider watching with the subtitles on? It seems like you sometimes have difficulty understanding the dialogue. You may have had less unanswered questions if you were able to read everything that was being said. Like the ceremony of the adolescent’s daemon settling into it’s permanent form. They spelled that out clearly but if you aren’t picking up everything that’s said things would certainly be more confusing.