Maybe it’ll work this time: “The King’s Speech director Tom Hooper and Logan‘s Dafne Keen are set to join the adaptation of Philip Pullman’s series “His Dark Materials, according to Deadline. Hooper is up to direct the eight part series while Keen is on board to play the main character Lyra.” For a given value of ‘work,’ of course. The great advantage of television over movies for this sort of thing is that it’s harder to say when something’s failed, financially. The market can be a cruel gatekeeper.
As to the merits? There was a potentially great series in His Dark Materials: unfortunately, it was filtered through the mind and pen of Philip Pullman. It’s not that he’s a bad writer, mind you. It’s just that his overwhelming ambition with the series was to be didactic. This is a common problem for children’s writers, of course, but in Pullman’s case it’s particularly noticeable.
Anyway, the first cinematic bite at this particular apple — oh, I slay myself — wasn’t exactly a failure, but Hollywood probably wasn’t up to the task of making a Gnostic kid’s movie where God is the Demiurge. BBC might have better luck. BBC probably will have better luck. Although they’ll almost certainly get a higher score on this one by deliberately crossing out the “kid’s” part in the above description.
I know. The thought of that amuses me, too.
Moe Lane
PS: I really should sit down and watch The Voyage of the Dawn Treader at some point.
I recall when The Golden Compass was being aggressively pushed by the publisher, bookstores, and all sorts of tastemakers.
.
And I didn’t know anybody who had actually read it, or wanted to.
I did read it, because it was alternate history and that’s my favorite SF genre. And I wanted to like it, but every time it started getting interesting it was like a switch had been pulled.
Never read it myself either, but all the background info gave good reason: It is a series that at is foundation is NOT-something: An anti-Narnia. Most works of that nature tend to lose themselves because they have no where to go in the end.