Somewhere, there is an assembly line that puts together movie adaptations of fantasy epics. The first stop on this line gives us the narrated infodump providing the Story So Far. The second shows us children playing in happier times, set to whimsical music. Throughout they put in setups for later payoffs – if someone mentions some great loss in his past, you can be sure he’ll be rectified before close of play – like a checklist. And someone, somewhere, is going to mention a damn prophecy.

In fact, so much of The Golden Compass is fantasy-by-numbers that all that really interests you is what makes this world so special that some studio had to spend millions to bring it to life. The uniqueness is there if you look for it, but it labors under so much rote storytelling and sweeping CGI vistas that it takes an inordinate amount of time to get anywhere remotely interesting.

Orphan girl Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards, because no child actress can find work without that first name) lives in a world where peoples’ souls travel beside them in animal form called daemons, representing the inner state and trustworthiness of that character; mercenaries have wolves, scholars have owls, slimy little scientists have praying mantises, and so on. She lives in some kind of grand college, occasionally checked in on by her uncle, Lord Asrael (Daniel Craig). Lyra desperately wants to travel north to see the land of the Ice Bears, and she is of course the last person alive who can use the last Golden Compass in existence. You can ask the Golden Compass anything, and it will “reveal the truth others want to keep hidden,” as one character puts it. I’m not convinced of the utility of such a device in a world where everyone’s inner being is sitting on their shoulder for all the world to see. Also handy: It can answer any question Lyra thinks to pose it, providing us character backstory in quick thirty-second bursts helpfully narrated by Lyra herself.

So Lyra wants to travel north and becomes the “personal assistant” to Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman, ice queen to end all ice queens) who appears to have some relation to the sinister Magesterium, a church-like organization that “kindly” tells people how to live their lives, and most importantly tries to track down any sources of “dust”—the metaphysical property that binds the various universes together. The Magesterium wants the dust so they can rule all known reality. Lyra grows wise to this, and to the Magesterium’s sinister plan to sever all children from their daemons. She joins forces with the deposed Ice Bear king Iorek Byrnison (voice of Ian McKellen), flying witch Serafina Pekkala (Eva Green), “aeronaut” cowboy Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott), and a score of others, including her own daemon Pantalaimon (voice of Freddie Highmore). That paragraph should be enough to convince future adapters that names that look great on paper don’t translate very well to an audio-visual medium.

It’s about halfway through the movie’s two-hour running time before The Golden Compass beats back its own cliché baggage and becomes interesting in its own right, but with all that time lost to graceless setup, “interesting” is as far as it can go. What cohesion the movie does summon comes, surprisingly, from the young Richards, who grows from generic sassy moppet into a child that’s quite believable in her courage and recklessness. Even still, her character motivation can best be summarized as “do the exact opposite of whatever any grown-up tells you to do, and as quickly as possible.” But there’s real iron in the girl, and the rest of the Compass – presented here more as a panoply of good ideas and less as a cohesive world – gains traction by the centering power of her presence. Children may be more engaged by the movie than I was, but adults will only find themselves entertained, not transported.

A brief word on the “controversy.” A various assortment of Christian groups, mostly those who enjoy the most widespread and pervasive cultural hegemony in the history of the world and choose to spend it by acting like victims all the time, have protested the release of this movie. They feel it insults or threatens their religion, or at the very least besmirches its good name in the world. I have some advice for them: If you’re really that worried about how you look to others, then perhaps you should spend all that energy you use forwarding e-mails, waving placards, and snarling by doing something different like working in a soup kitchen or building houses with Habitat for Humanity. Something like that may actually change how people feel about you for the better, and it would heal more than your own easily-wounded egos. Just a thought.