His Dark Materials: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		5.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.5

His Dark Materials: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie Review

. . .and now, the *rest* of the story.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 17, 2020

When is raking in more than 372 million bucks considered a “failure”? When you’re in the movie business, baby, especially after a little film called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had more than doubled that already gargantuan income by raking in almost a billion dollars. Harry Potter refracts into His Dark Materials in at least a couple of ways, probably most notably in that after the first several Potter films were released and made a combined several billion dollars, there was an understandable rush on the part of bean counters in any number of studios desperately looking for the next “young adult” novel series that could be adapted in order to generate that hoped for kind of rapturous response at the box office. That desire led to 2007’s The Golden Compass, a film based on the first novel in the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman which offered all kinds of “Potter-esque” magic, and which also featured a relatively young focal character, in this case a girl named Lyra. The Golden Compass encountered some of the same kind of pushback from religious conservatives that greeted Harry Potter, though while Potter was decried as being at least “pagan” and possibly “Satanic”, The Golden Compass was faulted for being anti-religious in general. It's perhaps notable that in the admittedly short and pretty generalist "making of" supplements included on this release that The Golden Compass never even gets a real mention, and is only alluded to, including by Pullman, in terms of "other adaptations" or, in the case of a producer, with a passing reference to New Line, who released the feature film and evidently encountered some financial problems as a result, despite that insane $372,000,000 take at the box office.

There is some really interesting and perhaps relevant reportage available online for the enterprising Googler about what was evidently the fairly troubled production and post-production history of The Golden Compass, including quite a few interviews with people who were “there” at the time. In that regard, while His Dark Materials’ first season is basically an unredacted Golden Compass, evidently the original vision for the feature film was something at least a bit more akin to the approach taken by the series. And in fact even Pullman, who at least gave some positive lip service to The Golden Compass at various points, is on hand in some of the supplements here discussing how a story with as many strands as this one does is really allowed to flourish with a longer form treatment. While that may have been the original intention, it sounds from some of the subsequent reporting that New Line didn't want a three or four hour film, and even undertook its own revisions and/or edits before the film was finally released.

What that means is that anyone who has seen The Golden Compass is going to have pretty regular flashes of déjà vu at least in terms of the broad outlines of this tale which involves Lyra Belacqua (Dafne Keen), a young girl growing up in an alternate universe which is in some ways somewhat like ours. That includes some ostensibly "real" locations such as cities like London, even if they're occasionally underwater and/or visited by huge dirigible like airships (the entire series, like the film, has a kind of "Steampunk" retro-futuristic aspect in terms of its production design). Lyra's adventurous relative Asriel (James McAvoy) has been on a mission far north that he hopes may undermine the authority of a religious order known as Magesterium, a group which controls virtually all aspects of daily life and (they hope, anyway) even thought. A mysterious woman named Marisa Coulter (Ruth Wilson) arrives to ostensibly help Lyra when one of her friends, like a number of other children, has apparently been kidnapped.

Fans of the book series who saw The Golden Compass at some point can probably list off the several ways the film departed from its source novel, and in that regard this "long form" series hews much closer to Pullman's original text. That is especially notable in some of the ostensible sidebars, notably the whole subplot involving so-called "Gyptians", and in fact I'd single out the whole Ma Costa (Anne-Marie Duff) character as being considerably better fleshed out in this version. There are occasional casting decisions that may appeal to elements of the contemporary zeitgeist but which may not actually be as felicitous as in the film version. Lin-Manuel Miranda's Lee Scoresby is perfectly fine, but comes off as almost comedy relief in this version, and while it's arguable that no one has the swagger of Sam Elliott (who played Scoresby in the film version), I couldn't help but think of Elliott's characterization as being preferable.

Ruth Wilson's approach to Mrs. Coulter is considerably different than Nicole Kidman's in the film, which perhaps aids and abets a certain ambiguity that the character needs to display (I won't go into any more detail in order not to post any spoilers, but fans of the book and/or The Golden Compass will probably know to what I'm referring). The series' production design is artfully handled, and the CGI animals, including the "external souls" known as daemons, as well as the polar bear characters, are surprisingly lifelike and relatively realistic looking. There is a somewhat more bittersweet, even melancholic, feeling to the wrap up in particular in the series as opposed to the film (which may have a relatively more upbeat ending imposed on it), even if at the same time the show offers hope with its hints of "new adventures" awaiting Lyra.

His Dark Materials: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

His Dark Materials: The Complete First Season is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of HBO and Warner Brothers Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. The IMDb discloses both Arri Alexa and Sony CineAlta cameras captured the imagery, but unfortunately there's no data on the resolution of the DI. Detail levels are impressive enough throughout this presentation that I personally wouldn't be surprised if a 4K DI had been done. The series' incredibly handsome and evocative production design is really pretty much flawlessly offered here, with fine detail on the often pretty luxe fabrics on costumes or even some of the hardware like a certain golden compass are beautifully rendered. Even the CGI tends to look nicely sharp and well detailed throughout the series, especially with regard to elements like the fur or feathering on many of the daemons. The palette is nicely suffused throughout and even some heavily graded moments don't really result in any significant detail losses.

His Dark Materials: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

His Dark Materials: The Complete First Season offers an often nicely immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. A number of standout sequences scattered throughout the first season establish various environments with some authority. Some of Asriel's "northern" adventures are particularly well designed, with elements like whipping winds rustling through the side and rear channels. Frequent outdoor material and even some of the interior scenes, as in an early footrace involving Lyra, offer nice surround activity and well placed discrete channelization of individual effects. The series' lush score also fills the surround channels winningly. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout the season.

His Dark Materials: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This is another release with some kind of arbitrarily edited and/or divided supplements. Disc One features a bunch of rather short featurettes whose titles disclose their focus, but Disc Two then offers a longer "making of" featurette that actually includes quite a few of the interviews seen in the shorter featurettes on Disc One.

Disc One

• Adapting His Dark Materials (1080p; 4:04)


• Building His Dark Materials (1080p; 5:54)


• Dressing His Dark Materials (1080p; 3:15)


• The Daemons of His Dark Materials (1080p; 3:43)


• James McAvoy: Bringing Lord Asriel to Life (1080p; 3:17)


• Lin-Manuel Miranda: Bringing Lee Scoresby to Life (1080p; 2:25)


• Ruth Wilson: Bringing Mrs. Coulter to Life (1080p; 3:24)


• Dafne Keen: Bringing Lyra Belacqua to Life (1080p; 4:26)

Disc Two

• Making His Dark Materials (1080p; 31:33) is probably a better all around look at the production than some of the featurettes above, especially since this piece uses so many of the same interviews. This has some nice behind the scenes footage, including some fun shots of the puppets that were used on set to help actors finesse sight lines and interactions with the later CGI additions.

His Dark Materials: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I've joked in some other reviews about the venerable radio star Paul Harvey, who memorably used to offer his listeners "the rest of the story" in terms of whatever subject he was talking about. That sentiment is very much the case with regard to this first season of His Dark Materials. Fans of the book series who then went to see The Golden Compass will perhaps find this introductory year unavoidably a bit of a rehash, even if it introduces a veritable glut of "new" material that the feature film never really addressed. That said, this debut year sets things up extremely well for what will be the "real" new material as the series gets into the other books of Pullman's franchise. Technical merits are solid, and while newcomers to Pullman's works will find this engaging, for Pullman fans in particular His Dark Materials: The Complete First Season comes Highly recommended .