Nicole plays evil blonde

Nicole Kidman steals the show as the bewitching villainess hunting the truth-seeking golden compass in this Philip Pullman adaptation, but the ideas about good and evil are a bit of a cop out, says Peter Bradshaw. Not since the novels of CP Snow have the political shenanigans and manoeuvrings of an Oxbridge college been taken so very seriously.

Can it really be true that a rivalry between fellows, and cold glances and frosty words exchanged at high table and in the senior common room, are the key to a metaphysical contest on which hangs the future of the universe as we know it?

Well, according to this film, the answer appears to be ... yes.

The first movie-episode in Philip Pullman's much-admired fantasy novel series, His Dark Materials, entertainingly pits a feisty teen heroine against the evil cosmic forces of psychological tyranny.

It's a convoluted, enjoyable, very mad, deeply conservative and, at one moment, horribly violent extravaganza.

There's no doubt about what buttons The Golden Compass is pushing. It looks like Hogwarts, Narnia, Middle Earth, or Tatooine. Christopher Lee has a small speaking role. Its weird internal universe takes some getting used to, however, and to this non-Pullman-reader, the claims often made on behalf of his legend about striking a blow for rationalism against religious authoritarianism don't precisely hold up. Of this, more in a moment.

Nicole Kidman steals the show as the bewitching yet hateful villainess Mrs Coulter: an appalling figure of pure blonde evil.

Has her name been inspired by America's neocon glamour-queen Ann Coulter? She slinks about the place in pricey couture and non-faux fur collars that scream: "All sorts of animals were harmed in the making of this garment!"

Mrs Coulter plans to get into her clutches the young heroine, Lyra Belacqua, and she particularly wishes to grab Lyra's alethiometer, or golden compass, a precious, magical instrument that enables the owner to tell not the time, but the truth, and so hated by the forces of darkness.

Lyra is nicely played by 13-year-old newcomer Dakota Blue Richards, though with an Artful Dodger-ish "urchin" accent that comes and goes a bit.

As she battles the bad guys, Lyra makes common cause with an exotic band of brothers, including nomad grandees, played by Jim Carter and Tom Courtenay, and a very large polar bear, voiced by Ian McKellen, who gets involved in a horrible piece of bear-on-bear violence: explicit enough, perhaps, to exclude some of the series' youngest fans from the cinema.

The story unfolds in a hyperreal, retro-futurist world, with Heath Robinson-esque flying machines hovering and clattering overhead.

It is a world in which everyone has his or her own "daemon", like a witch's familiar, representing each person's irreducible spirit.

The British cities of London and Oxford are crowded, bulbous, Gilliamesque places of cod-classical architecture. One building in particular looks like a delirious and grandiose mixture of Westminster Abbey, the Royal Academy in Piccadilly and the University of London Senate House in Bloomsbury. This is the headquarters of the Magisterium, a sinister mind-control cult that resents any free-thinking from anyone. Their aim is to establish a Vatican-Caliphate-Soviet dominating all our minds.

They naturally hate and fear Lord Asriel, a gallant hero in defence of free thought - played by Daniel Craig, sporting a distinctive non-Bond beard for the occasion.

He is Lyra's adored uncle and guardian, and lets her live in an attic room in the Oxford college where he is a lecturer. Asriel is the dashing anthropologist who, in his travels across the frozen north, has discovered evidence of other worlds and other existences, and is therefore suspected of heresy by the Magisterium, which is represented at Asriel's Oxford college by the wicked Fra Pavel, an Italianate clerical figure, like something out of The Da Vinci Code, and played by Simon McBurney. His essential awfulness is denoted not by any cilice mortifying the flesh, but by his grotesque comb-over-baldness.

Asriel and his perky niece are therefore legitimate targets for these creepy bad guys who are especially outraged by Asriel's heterodox claims to have discovered a form of cosmic "dust" from an unacknowledged multiverse of meaning that the Magisterium doesn't want us to know about.

My worry is that this multiverse of proscribed cosmic truthfulness could contain any amount of homeopathy and astrology, and we are being sneakily invited to assent to the idea that scientific rationalism is another type of mind-control. If so, it's fudging the idea of good and evil, and it's something that makes me suspect Pullman's invented universe, spectacular as it appears here, may actually be a bit feeble.

But Nicole Kidman's glamorous and arresting turn is what gives the zip and the swish to the story as it powers along: you can hear the faint crackle of her stockings as she sashays threateningly on to the screen, an arresting mixture of Darth Vader and Veronica Lake.