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His Dark Materials
I assume that most people who clicked through are already familiar with the books, so I'm not going to summarize the plot here. Wikipedia has short summaries of the books, but they're not spoiler-free, just FYI.
The motif of "prophecy says unknowing child will save the world and bad guys want to prevent this" is hardly new. I was able to get caught up in the story through the two main POV characters (Lyra and Will), so it didn't feel as heavy-handed as some stories with this motif. I found myself caring about some of the key characters. I was mad at Pullman for killing Roger at the end of book one and John Parry at the end of book two, both because their stories felt incomplete at the time of death. (I regretted the death of Lee but did not have that same "we were cheated" reaction there.) Of course death wasn't the final word on any of them, but I'll talk about the world of the dead later (since that was pretty much the point at which I thought the story took a dive).
There were some nice "this is not our world" moments, and the entire world of the mulefa succeeded in being alien and interesting to me. It was during Mary's arc in this world that I realized I was not getting a good sense of the passage of time in the entire trilogy; she learned their language, which surely takes time, and that's when I noticed we weren't really getting any clues about time flow. So I don't know if the trilogy unfolded over weeks (seems unlikely), months, or a couple years. I'm guessing 6-12 months, but I don't know why I think that.
In the second and third books (not so much in the first) Pullman gives us several arcs that eventually come together, and I felt he got the calibration mostly right for when to switch among them. That style of storytelling can feel choppy; this didn't until toward the end. (More than once I found myself saying "no, don't switch now", which I think is a mark of good storytelling.
Suspension of disbelief failed for me in several ways. Let me just list some key ones:
- Mrs. Coultier. Her return from the dark side was unconvincing, as was her apparentl ability to dupe just about anyone. I was actually pleased that Asriel played her once (with the "theft" of that aircraft), because it was a refreshing change. C'mon; Metatron is supposed to be an all-knowing angel; she should not have been able to dupe him! Especially not that easily.
- Lyra and the world of the dead. The same Lyra who's been telling us for two and a half books how important the bond is between human and daemon, the one who intervened when daemons were being separated from children -- that Lyra was willing to just leave her daemon waiting outside while she went into the world of the dead, because of a dream? Yes yes, it was painful and she hated to do it, blah blah blah -- I wanted a compelling reason. Later someone (I forget who) says that she felt she had to do it to fulfill a prophecy, but I didn't get that from her at the time. I almost bailed at this point (but since I'd already come 900 pages, I figured I could do the last 250 or so).
- The daemons' reappearance. I don't see a path from where they were left to where they ended up. This part of the story seemed to treat them like chess pieces, except for the part where you just pick up your rook and teleport it across the board behind the opponent's king, 'cause you felt like it. If you'll pardon the expression, it was too deus ex machina.
- That was the great temptation that led the church to send out assassins? Oh, c'mon.
- I don't really believe that it was necessary for Lyra and Will to be forever separated. I mean yes, from a storytelling perspective they have to be, but the plot points don't support it. They just need to maintain one doorway between worlds, like they're doing for the souls. Having the opening doesn't cause problems; only making it does, and if there are thousands of spectres running around already (and which the angels promise to deal with), what's one more?
Because I don't read "the authority" as being God, I don't find the portrayal offensive -- just trite. The character is weak, but also irrelevant. I'm not sure why he's there; he doesn't affect the story. My reaction was pretty close to "eh". Metatron (and what kind of a name is that, anyway?) was two-dimensional, unbelievable (as I mentioned earlier), and, well, just your standard cardboard bad guy. I was hoping for something more interesting. I wonder if Pullman was trying to make a "life is pointless and then you die and that's pointless too" point out of this. If he was, I suppose I'd be more offended if I thought the purpose of life was to get to heaven on the other end, but since I don't it fell flat for me. (To be clear, I don't think most Christians believe that either, though non-Christians sometimes portray them that way.)
I liked the books for their world-building, for some interesting characters, and for most of the story being told. There were interesting, rich details there. (And I want some of those gadgets. :-) ) In the end, though, the story did not come together for a satisfying end. I enjoyed most of the episodes along the way, but the finale fell flat.
I don't see how they're going to be able to do more movies, by the way. They cut out a lot of the important themes in making the first one; that's going to be hard with the second and harder with the third. I suppose we'll get a romp through worlds and a big fight at the end with not much in the way of explanation behind it. That's assuming they make more movies; I kind of wonder if the ending of the first was where it was so it would stand alone if the others don't get made.
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Metatron predates Materials, showing up fairly often as a senior angel - if you saw Dogma (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120655/), that was Alan Rickman's character, just to pick another recent example, and without digging for them I'd still comfortably bet there are John Constantine references. The Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatron) cites a brief reference in the Talmud and in the pseudepigraphical Book of Enoch, but when secondary sources start waxing poetic about Enochian angel esoterica and Kabbalah, I start reading through a pretty unforgiving bullshit filter at this point so YMMV.
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The section where the kids are in the Underworld was really poorly written, in my opinion. "Oh, this is so awful! How can we go on?" "We *must* go on!" Geez. So much of the rest is just excellent; I have no idea how that prose got past his editor.
And in the end, when the kids are separated forever, I wanted to just scream. Yeah, it's a standard ending for a children's book, but there was just no good reason for it here. As you say, leaving one window open would have worked. So would opening a window for one hour per year, making a contract with an angel to hunt down the resulting specter. So would just exchanging deamons, which was the approach I thought Pulman was going to take. But noooooooo, we have to have the 'No one at school will believe me!' ending.
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And I'm not just saying that because you hit on many of the things that didn't work for me! I felt the daemons were an interesting idea that was just wasted, thrown away after the first book; and that the ending was tragedy for its own sake...
It's good to know I'm not the only one...
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This is a pretty good one-line summary of the trilogy, I think. :)