Around the same time Peter Jackson was busy naming each of the statues in his wheelbarrow-full of awards for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, studio heads, writers, and everyone with even a delusion of power in the movie industry was busy trying to find the next Frodo Baggins. Just as a cavalcade of films that were dubbed Tarantino-esque followed the success of Pulp Fiction, the success of the Lord of the Rings movies and, even moreso, the Harry Potter movies have created a family-fantasy mini-genre unto themselves - inspiring some good, but mostly very, very bad designer imposters. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe may have made roughly a gazillion dollars worldwide, but it didn't get nearly the praise of LOTR or Harry Potter, and it's all been downhill since. Eragon was an undeniable mess, barely anyone saw this year's abysmal The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, and now we're presented with the well-intentioned, but almost as much of a disaster, The Golden Compass.

As the The Golden Compass opens, set in a strange alternate universe, Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards), an orphan living at Oxford College, joins a long line of precocious chosen ones when she secretly enters a room where the evil Magisterium is about to meet with her uncle, the explorer Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig). She catches the head of the Magisterium trying to poison her uncle, which starts a chain reaction that sends Lyra spiraling into an epic adventure about the search for mysterious elemental particles called Dust. Before she can figure out what's happening, her friend Roger is kidnapped by a group of child-stealing villains named "The Gobblers", and Lyra has to figure out how to save Roger, what all this talk of Dust is, why her uncle is being targeted, and what to do with the strange gift she has been recently given, an alethiometer or a golden compass. The alethiometer can answer any question asked by someone who knows how to read the bizarrely ornate, impossibly complex machine, and, according to prophesy, Lyra might just be the one person who can actually do just that.

Lyra is taken from Oxford by the glamorously chilling Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) and discovers that her new guardian has been controlling The Gobblers and trying to do something evil with her child friends. (I do love that the villain of a very-likely profitable fantasy film shares a name with Anne Coulter. We should teach all of our children to fear Coulters.) Along for the adventure are talking bears, souls that walk alongside their owners in animal form, a group called the Gyptians, and an aeronaut played by Sam Elliot, who looks throughout like he's just dying to call someone "The Dude." Everyone, including a witch played by Eva Green, shows up for a Return of the King-esque battle in the final act that is meant to stand as a satisfying conclusion to the film, despite the fact that the scenes that follow it are the most franchise-setup-friendly scenes since Frodo and Sam looked towards Mordor and the credits rolled on Fellowship. What director Chris Weitz falls to realize, though, is that Fellowship had built up enough character and action to stand as a film on its own. The Golden Compass feels from first frame to last like nothing more than the first act of a franchise. Weitz even pulled the final three chapters from the novel to include in the next film. You don't even get the whole first book for your movie dollar.

But I don't blame Peter Jackson for all of this franchise politicking. I blame Chris Columbus. Chris made as safe a version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as possible, and the masses came out like worms after a storm. As J.K. Rowling's eyes glossed over at the dailies, Columbus threw Harry Potter fans a fastball down the middle of the plate. Here was everything they loved about the book on-screen, free from any interpretation, personality, or actual imagination. Chris Weitz's controversial adaptation of His Dark Materials: Northern Lights (also known as The Golden Compass in the US) by Philip Pullman tries to have it both ways, but ultimately falls on its own pointy sword.

Like the first Potter film, Golden Compass is about as safe and unimaginative a fantasy film as you'll ever see, but it also makes the mistake of drastically changing the source material, meaning it's likely to infuriate both fans new to the material and fans of Pullman's trilogy. If you've been reading about the controversy surrounding the film, you'll know that Weitz pulled out all of the religious, anti-church references from the book when he adapted it and, as a result, it seems like a film that, ironically, has lost its soul. Everything feels so frustratingly by the numbers. Armored bears with the voices of Ian McKellen and Ian McShane are almost impossible to screw up too badly and will provide some visual entertainment for fantasy fans, but the truth is that there's just nothing memorable about The Golden Compass.

With all of the weighty, real-world issues removed and the entire project turned into nothing more than a franchise starter, the film has been reduced to nothing but plot-driven dialogue about alethiometers, gobblers, and other fantasy mumbo-jumbo. It becomes impossible to care about what Lyra and her mates are doing when the dialogue is designed to do nothing but push you forward to the next film. Movie fans love their fantasy films nowadays as the Potter movies continue to impress and petitions get fired up to bring Jackson back to Middle Earth, so Golden Compass will undeniably do well enough to make the second film in the series an inevitability. Let's hope that film is more than just a preview for the next chapter in the series.