The Golden Compass is just the sort of film we liberal-minded middle-class parents want our children to love, the real wooden toy in an age of violent computer games. It’s that rarest of blockbuster beasts: a film that stretches children’s imaginations and stimulates their intelligence with important ideas and issues. Films like this, we hope, will turn our offspring into nice liberal secularists, like mummy, daddy and Richard Dawkins. Yeah, okay, but will they love it?

The successful launch of a new fantasy franchise is always a difficult task, especially when it’s based on a much-loved series such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels. The director, Chris Weitz, has to strike a balance between meeting fans’ expectations and appealing to family audiences unfamiliar with the material. On the whole, he gets it right.

The first instalment in a series is always the most difficult, because you have to spend so much time setting up the damn thing, including people and plot lines that will have their payoff two or three movies later. George Lucas got around this by fast-forwarding his Star Wars saga to the exciting parts, then going back to the boring era of Darth Vader’s childhood. Weitz doesn’t take such an easy option. The film begins with a voice-over that gives us a quick guide to this new world. Call me stupid, but, even so, I had difficulty following what it was all about. Anbaric energy? Gobblers? Gyptians? Intercision? (That sounds painful.) Parallel whatsits? Daemons? Parental warning: swot up on your Pullman before you go.

As far as I could tell, this is a story about a 12-year-old girl, Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), who lives in a parallel world to our own, where there are good witches and cold bitches (Nicole Kidman as Marisa Coulter). As bad guys, we have the Magisterium, a sinister body, not unlike the Catholic church during the Inquisition, that controls all thought and human knowledge. When Lyra’s friend Roger (Ben Walker) is kidnapped, she heads off on a dangerous adventure to the glacial north to rescue him. Oddly, Lyra, who has grown up a ward of Jordan College, Oxford, among scholars, talks like a cockney street urchin.

Weitz’s main difficulty is that this is the first fantasy epic to feature a girl in the lead role. The form has traditionally been biased towards boys, men and hobbits doing battle. Lyra is not a mini Lara Croft, either. She’s resourceful, brave, smart and loyal, but her only weapon is the truth – in the form of an alethiometer, which resembles a golden compass and can tell you the truth about what people are thinking or have done. Boys, on the whole, prefer cool rings that make you invisible, or magic wands that do your bidding, and they may well be squirming in their seats for the first 40 minutes, longing for less talk and more action, which doesn’t appear until Lyra escapes from Coulter and heads north.

But what follows is worth the wait. Weitz has wisely avoided competing with The Lord of the Rings’s battle scenes. Instead, his set piece, beautifully executed, is a ferocious contest between two polar bears: Lyra’s protector, Iorek (voiced by Ian McKellen), and Ragnar (Ian McShane). And instead of freaky monsters, we get Coulter’s daemon, a ferocious monkey that is truly scary.

So, while the film may not offer “awesome” spectacle, it has a real beauty. Quiet but impressive craftsmanship has gone into it – the beauty of the airships, the horseless hansom cabs, the mechanised insects known as spy-flies. Pullman has said that the film “isn’t about computer graphics, it isn’t about fantastic adventures in amazing-looking worlds, it’s about Lyra”. Well, thank heavens they didn’t get him to direct, because some of the most stunning moments – when we see Lyra, riding, on the back of her bear, across the frozen wasteland of the north – are computer-generated.

The casting is mainly successful, but a little obvious. Blue Richards is an efficient, if not inspired, Lyra; Daniel Craig is perfect as her gruff but caring uncle; Kidman’s sexy but sinister Coulter is all icy chic and no character. She is like a CGI effect, as if entirely Botoxed. And it’s time directors realised that, when making a fantasy epic, there are other actors besides McKellen and Christopher Lee. That said, there’s enough magic here to make for a wonderful sequel.

TBC, 113 mins

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