2) I didn’t mind the pace much, but I think that’s because I really liked the setting and spent the first half of the movie just oohing and aahing at the sets and costumes.

3) I think that may be continued fallout from having been married to a Scientologist, but I’m not sure.

4) I can take or leave Daniel Craig myself, but if they keep casting them together I’ll probably keep watching. She’s cute.

I’ll probably go see the others just to see how they go about it. That and I’d love to see what they make the mulefa look like.

I’m not sure what issues people would have with Dakota Blue Richards, and I refuse to admit any expertise when it comes to little girls, so all said I didn’t mind her at all. Looks-wise she wasn’t too far off of my image of her from reading the books, and I didn’t think she did a bad job acting. That said, though, I understand that a lot of people have particular things that set them off about stories, movies, and actors so it could be something neither of us would notice, but would drive the other person completely crazy.

1.) I see why the Catholic League was up in arms. But, hey, that’s the cost of living in a free society - you have to let people you disagree with speak. Someday Bill Donohue will learn that. I’ve also learned that the books are even less subtle in their attacks on religion than the movie was.

2.) I thought that the pace was very slow (and almost boring) until the fight between the armored bears. Then it picked up dramatically, perhaps too much so. More a problem of direction than story.

3.) Whatever Nicole Kidman is doing to her face, she should’ve stopped three treatments ago.

4.) How many more movies are Daniel Craig and Eva Green going to do together?!

It was interesting, but even if this movie does well enough to warrant them making movies out of the rest of the trilogy, I’m not so sure I’d rush to the theater to see them.

A friend of mine saw the movie (having read the books) and enjoyed the movie except for the actress who played Lyra. She didn’t go into any specifics as to why, though. Your thoughts, good sir?

I think you may have stumbled on what I think is a flaw in commonly accepted definitions of determinism. Determinism is usually made up to be a product of causality. But I think that, in truth, causality (as we usually understand it) is meaningless in a deterministic universe. Causes and effects do not exist except in our minds. This has two aspects to it.

First, the so-called laws of physics are simply concise descriptions of how the universe works; they do not “cause” anything to happen. They are just commonly observed, concisely describable patterns. Newton’s laws do not produce any acceleration; they simply help us insignificant humans understand how acceleration results when a force is applied.

Second, and more to the point, nothing causes anything else in a deterministic universe. If the state of the entire universe is pre-determined at every point of time, what is the meaning of cause? When you say “A is a cause of B”, you usually mean “If A hadn’t occurred, all other things being the same, then B would not have occurred”. But in a deterministic universe, “If A hadn’t occurred” is meaningless. A did occur, and by determinism, nothing else could have happened. Speaking of A not having occurred is meaningless. Thus we can’t make causal statements of the sort we are accustomed to.

Rather, we need to adjust our thinking about causality. When we say “A is a cause of B”, what we should be thinking is “It is fairly easy for us humans to find a sequence of laws (concise descriptions of frequently occurring phenomena) connecting A to B”.

Thus, the atom in an unstable state and may decay, but not be*cause* of anything. We are searching for a common pattern (a law) into which the unstable atom, and its decay, fall. The fact that we are unable to locate such a pattern is what is bothering you. The reason for our inability to locate such a pattern is that there are as many patterns in which such an atom decays as those in which it does not decay.