Actually, it's not even "at root". It's made pretty explicit in the third book, where a character is introduced whose whole purpose is to say "this isn't just an allegory or a fantastic setting, this is really how the world actually is and this really is the real Christian church, and it's all TOTALLY EVIL, right?"

And the author himself has said that one of his greatest goals is to see the Christian church destroyed.

And, I guess, that's my concern about the film series. It gets _really_ strident in the last book, where it just gives up on the plot so that the author can beat us over the head with his tire-iron of a message. If the movie doesn't deviate sharply from the book, it's going to wreck people's goodwill for the series.

I'd never even heard of the series, so I couldn't judge if the article's author had an ax to grind or if this guy's series really was as wacky as he said.
Two votes for wacky from independent sources pretty much settles it IMO.

You'd think the astounding success of Gibson's The Passion, along with the resounding flops of various anti-war and anti-values films would teach Hollywood a lesson. They may be amoral hedonists, but they're greedy amoral hedonists. More than half a billion dollar gross for a movie that wasn't even in English should've run someone's bells.

Then again, Tinseltown is legendary for butchering source material to sell a movie, so who knows?

Starship Troopers FTW! Or the loss, to anyone who's ever read the actual book and then seen the complete and utter rotten crapload of a movie that was.

But I have to second Scott - never even heard of the series or the author. I think I might've seen one preview for it. It didn't even seem close enough to interesting to watch.

Not like some good hentai. That's a genre to get into.

The sneaky thing about "His Dark Materials" is that the first book isn't actually all that bad. It's well-written, albeit YA-oriented; the ideas are interesting; and while it presents the idea of an Evil Church, it doesn't try to claim that all Churches are inherently Evil and so this one is just running true to type. It leaves that for later books, particularly the third.

So what's going to happen is that people will go see "Golden Compass" and probably like it; they'll go to see the sequel, and sort of like that; then they'll go to see the third, and atheists will triumphantly proclaim that moviegoers everywhere are anti-religion because of the "massive showing at the third installment of this well-known antireligious story!"

I understand--and even The Urban Legends Reference pages (www.snopes.com) confirms it--that the author of the books is quite unapologetic about his desire to "bring down" organized religion, Christianity specifically. Said so in several interviews.

And since Catholicism is by far the biggest variety (and therefore makes a very appealing target to nearly anyone with an axe to grind), it gets singled out.

Can't see my $$$ going to support this sort of thing.