SOUL FOOD:

New Line Cinema has marketed its film “The Golden Compass” as a cousin of “The Chronicles of Narnia” and its own “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Its critics, though, say it’s more closely related to “The Da Vinci Code.”

For those who thought the Harry Potter series was a poisonous caldron of witchcraft and the occult, this movie adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novel has been envisioned as worse than a redux.

Set in a world parallel to but much different than our own, it tells the story of Lyra, a young girl with a singular destiny within it. The film stars Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig (“Casino Royale”) and 12-year-old Dakota Blue Richards.

“There are many universes and many earths parallel to each other,” a woman’s voice tells us in the beginning. There are worlds like ours, where our souls reside inside our bodies.

Then there are worlds like hers where souls walk beside people as animal spirits called “daemons.”

In her world there are witches of the air and Gyptians of the water and Bears of the ice. And scholars once invented a Golden Compass, which they called an Alethiometer, to show them “all that was hidden.”

All the worlds are connected by Dust but no one knows it anymore. The ruling power, we are told, destroyed the Alethiometers and banned any mention of Dust because they feared any truth but their own.

The film has been called a thinly disguised manifesto of atheism for children — bait to get viewers to buy Pullman’s books whose target market is said to be 9 to 12 year olds.

St. Ignatius Press has published a book titled “Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children’s Fantasy,” written by Pete Vere and Sandra Miesel, two of Pullman’s critics.

Miesel is a medievalist and a journalist. Vere is a canon lawyer and the co-author of “Surprised by Canon Law” and “More Catholic Than the Pope.”

According to him, Pullman’s work blasphemes the Judeo-Christian concept of God, depicts the Roman Catholic Church as evil, promotes the occult, endorses moral relativism and paints an “heretical portrayal of the human person.”

But it’s important to note that his criticisms are aimed at Pullman’s books. Like most warnings about the film, Vere’s were written before the film was released.

Reading Pullman’s books you can’t help but get a sense of a godless world. But the film is not the book.

Unlike adaptations of Rowling’s Potter narratives or Tolkien’s “Lord of Rings,” the film has not stuck as closely to its source. If the novel is indeed venomous, it’s been defanged, perhaps to appease Pullman’s critics.

In Pullman’s telling, “the Church” is more fleshed out from the start. The reader learns that in this parallel world of his multi-verse, the Papacy was moved to Geneva under Pope John Calvin, then abolished after his death.

The Magisterium, a “tangle of courts, colleges [of bishops] and councils” replaces it, and then exerts absolute authority “over every aspect of life.” But these kinds of details have been stripped away in the film, as has much else that makes Pullman’s fantasy world at all comprehensible.

Somehow, the writer’s gift for storytelling slipped through the filmmakers’ fingers.

The passions, the motives, the yearnings, the very character of its characters elude. We are teased by futile glimpses here and there.

And in spite of its stunning retro-futuristic set, we are never immersed in its world. All the pretty pictures do not imbue us with a sense of place.

Whatever one might think of Pullman’s religious beliefs (yeah, he did make “the church” the bad guys), he is a fine storyteller.

Even with the wide film release of “The Golden Compass” and its companion controversy, the book is hardly flying off bookstore shelves the way J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories did.

In Pullman’s native England it is different. “The Golden Compass,” the first part of a trilogy called “His Dark Materials,” won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Fiction Prize.

Like it or not, it is many, many cuts above Dan Brown’s wooden “Da Vinci Code” screed. And unlike Dan Brown, Pullman never insists the religious elements of his fictional saga are flatly fact. But that doesn’t mean you necessarily want to dash off with the kids to see the motion picture.

I was taken aback, for example, by the test put to Lyra by clan-queen witch Serafina to gauge whether Lyra could read the Alethiometer. Wearing a costume suited for the boudoir, Serafina proposes that Lyra tell her which of the Gyptians was once her lover.

Witches themselves will be a problem for some. Then there’s the armored ice bear fight that calls to mind dog fighting.

And while the word “Alethiometer” means “truth measure” — from the Greek words for truth (alètheia) and for measure (meter) — Lyra and others in her world are given to some serious lying with impunity.

One Alethiometer, it turns out, has survived the purge of the Magisterium. And because it is rumored that Lyra is the girl whom the witches have prophesied will save the world from its tyranny, the Alethiometer is put in her charge.

Pullman’s worlds are dark worlds, even the best of them. And the trilogy, far more than this present film, in no way pretends to a Christian worldview.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.