I saw both The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008) and The Golden Compass (2007) without having read the books on which they are based. My view of Spiderwick as a fantasy movie is that it's mediocre compared to The Golden Compass. Both films are too short to allow for much character development,

The Spiderwick Chronicles: 96 minutes
The Golden Compass: 113 minutes

but Compass does a better job in creating memorable characters and creatures.

Spiderwick, with its wispy 100-page book originals, can't have suffered much from being short, but The Golden Compass derives from a trilogy that, according to the comments of dedicated readers, compares with The Lord of the Rings in terms of characterization and complexity.

A comparison of the length of Chris Weitz's truncated film version of Compass with the length of the Peter Jackson film trilogy of Tolkein's masterpiece indicates that length does matter:

Fellowship of the Ring: 178 minutes (208 extended edition)
Return of the King: 201 minutes (251 extended edition)
The Two Towers:179 minutes (223 extended edition)

Both Compass and Spiderwick were box office flops. The Golden Compass is based on a book not as well-known in the United States as it is abroad, and the film came in for some Christian boycotting. The potential viewing audience for Spiderwick was a young readership for whom the movie is probably too scary. Cautious parents would have kept them away.

Christian criticism of The Golden Compass seems to be based more on the books by Philip Pullman than on the actual movie.

Pullman is an avowed atheist whose trilogy, "His Dark Materials," is an inverted retelling of Milton's Paradise Lost, a long religious poem about how Sin came into the world.

In the books, organized religion is seen as the enemy of human free will. In the film, the enemy is called the Magisterium. Critics are quick to point out that "magisterium" is a word that the Roman Catholic Church uses to refer to its "teaching authority." For the average viewer, however, the largely unfamiliar Latin word is simply the name of an oppressive government, like "the Empire" in the StarWars films.

Both films begin with disagreeable young protagonists.

Lyra, the protagonist of The Golden Compass, bursts onto the screen as a noisy, tough, insolent and ungrammatical urchin, hardly a parent's ideal child role model.

Jared Grace, the hero of The Spiderwick Chronicles, speaks a less jarring and more comprehensible variety of English than Lyra, but the viewer's first impression of him is that he is a bad-tempered, mean-spirited, disrespectful brat.

Lyra's courage and loyalty win us over early in the film, so that her rough manners and speech fade into insignificance as we find ourselves caring about her safety. Jared, however, remains unpleasant until near the end when he has a sudden change of personality. The film's unremitting action is entertaining while it is going on, but the characterization is superficial and the plot predictable.

The Golden Compass is an imperfect film because too much is crammed into too little footage. The acting and production values are as smooth as one could desire. My inner story meter told me that it didn't end in the right place, but I didn't mind too much as I can now read the books and find out what "really" happens.

Reading the books will probably be the only way anyone drawn in by the movie will ever have of finding out what happens next. It's highly unlikely that the second two books will find their way to the big screen.

Interestingly, Freddie Highmore, who battles strange creatures as the Grace twins in Spiderwick, is the voice of Lyra's shape-shifting daemon Pan in the other film.