You didn’t need a crystal ball to figure out that, once the Lord of the Rings flicks and the Harry Potter series started setting the box office on fire a few years back, Hollywood would start churning out fantasy flicks faster than you could say “Hufflepuff.”

And soon, sure as a Hobbit has hairy feet, the attempts to capitalize on those series’ success started to pile up. Unfortunately, most of them proved to be less than magical from a critical and commercial standpoint, with misfires like Eragon and The Seeker: The Dark is Rising threatening to send the genre back to the obscure realm of late night Dungeons and Dragons tournaments and the aisle at Barnes & Noble you’d be loath for your coffee date to catch you hanging out in. Still, one franchise did manage to make some bank in the wake of Harry and Frodo: the Disney co-produced Chronicles of Narnia series, whose bigger, badder, more epic-looking second installment, Prince Caspian, hits screens this week. Having never made it through more than a chapter or two of the C.S. Lewis books the Narnia movies are adapted from, I was surprised as how thoroughly I enjoyed the first film, The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe, and I’m happy to see the series – thinly-veiled Christian allegory or not – continuing to pick up speed.

As much as I’m looking forward to seeing Prince Caspian, though, the fact that the Narnia series is getting a second installment irritates me just a little because my personal favorite fantasy trilogy, after a disastrous box office showing last year, may never make it to a movie screen again. That’s a shame, because The Golden Compass – the little $180 million fantasy movie whose U.S. box-office failure essentially killed New Line Cinema – is actually a pretty awesome movie, even if few people in this country appreciated it (the film, at least, pulled in some decent bucks overseas).

Adapted from the first novel in Phillip Pullman’s controversial "His Dark Materials" trilogy, The Golden Compass is a triumph of production design and special effects that, although it can’t really elaborate on some of the more interesting ideas in the book, is still a compelling fantasy story, very interestingly told. Set in a fantasy version of Earth where religion and science are involved in a centuries-old slugfest and all humans have talking animal familiars (“daemons”) that follow them everywhere they go, Compass is a “chosen one” tale about a young girl named Lyra (played by newcomer Dakota Blue Richards) who’s entrusted by her adventurous Uncle Asriel (Daniel Craig) to protect a sought-after, future-predicting device called an “alethiometer” from the clutches of a villainous, supposedly divinely controlled world governing body called the Magisterium. Not even counting the daemons, the film’s world is richly populated with intriguing fantasy elements: a mysterious substance called “Dust” that may possibly allow passage to other universes (awesome), high-flying airships like the one piloted by sky cowboy Sam Elliott (really awesome), giant armored polar bears that battle each other to the death (really, really freakin’ awesome), etc.

The film, which careens between locations and introduces difficult-to-explain fantasy concepts at a way-too-rapid clip, is probably best enjoyed after digesting the novel on which it’s based, but there’s plenty to appreciate in the film version anyway – from Nicole Kidman’s deliciously icy performance as the Magesterium’s number-one villainess Mrs. Coulter (named after Ann, perhaps?) to the aforementioned polar bear battle royale to a creepy sequence set inside a lab where the baddies experiment on innocent children. Director Chris Weitz, who’d previously worked only on comedies both broad (American Pie) and more subtle (About a Boy), keeps the film flowing at a pretty good pace throughout, and shows some serious flair during the action sequences – the climactic sequence, in which humans, daemons, polar bears, and the kitchen sink scrap on an icy battlefield, is almost Lord of the Rings-quality.

In hindsight, I guess I’m not exactly shocked that The Golden Compass didn’t find its foothold with stateside audiences – it’s a lot to take in one sitting, it lacked the fanatical built-in fanbase that the Harry Potter series enjoys, and its subtle but still-there commentary on religion certainly didn’t make it an appealing prospect for the churchgoing audiences generally credited for boosting Narnia’s box-office take. Still, the film remains an uncommonly intelligent and inventive stab at the big-budget fantasy genre, and is nowhere near the failure that some critics made it out to be. And although we may never see the next two installments in the trilogy hit the big screen, what happens after the film’s cliffhanger ending can pretty easily be picked up in Pullman’s novels – and, hey, when’s the last time a Hollywood movie actually made you want to read something?