"The Golden Compass" *** (out of four): Writer-director Chris Weitz winnows down Philip Pullman's dense, unwieldy universe into a zippy, if not entirely thrilling, two hours.

Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy takes place in a complex, unwieldy world in which every character’s soul takes the form of a walking, talking animal called a “daemon”. There are also impressive airships, flying witches, armored ice-bears and a mysterious quasi-religious ruling class called the Magisterium. And, to be honest, the novel “The Golden Compass” (the first in the trilogy) never really caught on with me. There were just too many rules – you can’t touch another person’s daemon with your bare hands, if you kill the daemon you kill the person (and vice versa), and I never quite understood if you can overhear someone speaking to their daemon (or if it’s more of a “Calvin & Hobbes” situation). So writer-director Chris Weitz (“About a Boy”) deserves a lot of credit. He has taken Mr. Pullman’s first novel and winnowed it down to a manageable two-hour film which exists somewhere between the innocuous adaptation of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and the undeniable intensity of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”. On that note, it's worth mentioning that “Compass” represents a reunion of sorts for Saruman and Gandalf - Christopher Lee and Ian McKellen appear in the film (though the latter is as the voice of an ice-bear).

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