Alex Denney

Terrible. All that money and they've managed to somehow make the imaginative, engaging, fascinating world Philip Pullman invented in the HDM books a mere fancy backdrop for the story, which has been robbed of it's uniqueness in so many ways. Daemons are hardly anywhere to be seen, yet they're the core of the story, the score is generic and intrusive, we have self-consciously tight camera angles, some excruciatingly bad acting, one-dimensional characters, and some critical parts of the books robbed of their emotional impact by being reduced to a 5 minute portion of an episode (boy lost in village without daemon, bear fight being two examples). How on earth you can have 10 episodes and make the whole thing feel rushed is beyond me, but this just feels like a wasted opportunity to have made something great; instead it's just godawful.