Consumers (especially of the pop culture) have so many choices these days. Do you want your Hershey bars with or without almonds? Your cable with or without HD? Your fantasy world with or without God?

Three weeks before Christmas, New Line Cinema points its "Golden Compass" toward recouping a $180 million investment in what it hopes to be another "Lord of the Rings" franchise bonanza, having scrubbed the thing squeaky clean and free from all embarrassing anti-Christian stains.

The result is deeply hygienic.

Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" fantasy trilogy draws its name and inspiration from Milton's epic "Paradise Lost." But in Pullman's parallel theology, God is on the wrong side and the Fall leads to humanity's redemption. Actually, if I get the complex cosmology correctly, it's not so much God as the self-chosen godly people who are on the wrong side.

This particular, peculiar world resembles ours -- somewhat. It looks like an alternate-reality Oxford during a mutant Dickensian or Jules Verne late 19th century. Taxis take the form of bright red Zeppelins, and people live under an oppressive sort of Anglo-Taliban theocracy called the Magisterium.

Our headstrong heroine is 12-year-old Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), an orphan ward of the university, who overhears her iconoclastic uncle Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) hold forth to a group of scholars on a mysterious substance called "Dust." How mysterious can dust be? In my house, not very. But this Dust is different.

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''The Golden Compass''

• Starring: Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Dakota Blue Richards
• Rating: PG-13 for sequences of fantasy violence.
• Web site: 'The Golden Compass'

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Asriel rushes off to investigate it, leaving Lyra to investigate the sudden disappearance of her best friend, among many other kids. Rumor has it they're being snatched up by Magisterial rendition and taken to the Arctic for chilling experiments in more ways than one. A Mrs. Coulter (to be or not to be confused with Ann) takes Lyra under her strapless wing, but she's up to no good. Lyra ditches her on the way to the Arctic to get to the metaphysical bottom of it all.

Ah, but not before a college don gives her -- drumroll -- the Golden Compass. It's a long-forbidden truthometer, a kind of combined super-cell phone and Googling device for any and all emergencies. Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) wants it. Lyra's gonna need it.

Lyra's also going to need Iorek Byrnison (voice of Ian McKellan), a deposed polar bear king, as her knight-in-shabby-fur-and-armor. But her closest pal is her "daemon," her alter-ego animal companion that has a physical attachment to her and verbally expresses what's going on inside her head. Every human has one in this world. Lyra's is an adorable flying marmoset named Pan (voice of Freddie Highmore), who shifts his shape rapidly to cat or rat or ermine, reflecting her mood.

Parallels between Pullman's world and C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia" are unavoidable: Alternate worlds. Talking animals. Lyra's Jesus-like lion Aslan vs. Lucy's secular savior-bear Iorek. But Pullman has made his opinion clear, calling the Narnia books "morally loathsome, among the most poisonous things I've ever read," fetishizing childhood innocence and demonizing the sexual awakening that triggers self-knowledge. "This so-called original sin is anything but. It's the thing that makes us fully human."

He is equally dismissive of Tolkien's hermetically sealed world as "infantile," primarily concerned with "maps, plans, languages and codes." As for himself: "I'm not in the message business; I'm in the 'Once upon a time' business."

New Line first commissioned Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay but rejected it out of concern for its "perceived antireligiosity." The final script avoids the word "Church" like the plague, substituting "Magisterium" and modifying the churchmen's fashion look from Spanish Inquisitioner to Nazi Stormtrooper. Indeed, all religious imagery has been so pureed into the production design you need a magnifying glass to find it.

Director Chris Weitz, best known for the raunchy teen comedy "American Pie," handles the first big set piece wonderfully -- a riveting fight to the death between Iorek and the usurper bear king. Voicing them, the dueling Ians -- McKellen and McShane -- out-roar each other in British accents. Henry Braham's photography is a visual feast. But the grand finale battle scene fizzles: Russian Kossacks, Arctic bears, pirates of the Caribbean who wandered onto the wrong set -- very geographically schizophrenic.

Kidman, with her Marilyn Monroe's evil-twin look is seductively menacing. Craig disappears after the opening. Simon McBurney is the most deliciously vile of villains.

Love that girl hero, though. Dakota Blue Richards, the unknown English schoolgirl, has fine presence even if she, like the film, isn't totally captivating.

A book-to-movie rule of thumb is that the film should be able to stand on its own two feet, but I'm not sure "Golden Compass" even has two legs. Inspired by the Harry Potter and Ring successes, studios buy the rights to popular fantasy novels, throw a hundred million-plus at the director, and sit back awaiting an international hit, doling out brilliant F/X at every chance to distract you from the fact that, if you haven't read the books, you may have only a hazy notion of what's going on, let alone why.

"Compass" concludes abruptly, the credits starting to roll on an upbeat kind of Wizard of Oz note -- the most blatant "To Be Continued" I've ever seen. In fact, it's not an ending at all, just a trailer for the sequel.

They don't even pretend that this spectacular but largely hollow Dust-up is self-contained.