Popping in about Potter...
Loaning out your favorite toy is always a scary, nail-biting thing. You don't know how it will turn out, after all: Sometimes the ball comes back just as you last saw it, and sometimes it comes back deflated.
Unfortunately, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix falls into the latter category.
As far as I'm concerned, the fifth Harry Potter book was the best yet-the most amazing, exhilarating, and emotionally powerful thing I've read in a long time. Umbridge was the essence of skin-scrawling evil. When the Weasley brothers made their great escape, I cheered aloud, and when tartly wonderful Minerva McGonagall was attacked by Ministry representatives, I cried.
But the movie slickly passed by everything in the book worth keeping. It had no emotional highs, no emotional lows, no moments so visceral you wanted to chuck your popcorn at the screen. It had only plot, and event after event whizzing by at breakneck speed, peopled with cigar store Indians rather than actors. If the Goblet of Fire was a big, dumb Michael Bay extravaganza, OOTP was a latter-day George Lucas mess, relying on techie trickery over any sort of narrative flow or power.
But perhaps the movie's single greatest affront is its lack of humor. Unlike the story as J.K. told it, the film is a murky gray blur of mind-numbing ennui. Sure there were dark and terrible things in the book, but there were also deliciously silly ones: the cupids at Madame Puddifoots, "Rescue Mission" name badges, bat bogey hexes, and Hogwarts' own Weasley Memorial Swamp. But in the movie? There's barely a bright moment, barely even the kind of cheap, throwaway laughs offered by some of the series' previous installments.
Although the script follows the book closely (to the point of even including a bunch of direct quotes), I don't think the new screenwriters really got it-the Harry Potter series is about relationships, every single bit as much as it's about magic. There is no camaraderie in the movie (see The Prisoner of Azkaban for how to handle this right), and it seems the characters barely even care about each other. This is especially easy to see in the scene where Voldemort possesses Harry in the Ministry of Magic. The point of this exercise was not for Harry to chew on scenery while giving a brief speech about how Voldemort sucks. The point was Dumbledore's love for Harry, and how he was unwilling to hurt his favorite student-not even when Voldemort gave him the opportunity to end it all, to save thousands of lives, just for the price of this one boy.
You can make excuses for it until the cows come home-It's a transitional movie! The director is new! The material in the book could never work on screen!-but the fast-forward world of OOTP does not live up to the grand, epic, and most of all personal book on which it is based. This is not J.K.'s fault; in other hands (see once again PoA) this film could have had meaning and spirit and heart.
But I guess you could say that the movie exactly like the book, post dementor's kiss, anyway: What should have been tense was perfunctory. What should have been terrifying was kind of cool. And what should have been breathtaking was just okay.
Unfortunately, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix falls into the latter category.
As far as I'm concerned, the fifth Harry Potter book was the best yet-the most amazing, exhilarating, and emotionally powerful thing I've read in a long time. Umbridge was the essence of skin-scrawling evil. When the Weasley brothers made their great escape, I cheered aloud, and when tartly wonderful Minerva McGonagall was attacked by Ministry representatives, I cried.
But the movie slickly passed by everything in the book worth keeping. It had no emotional highs, no emotional lows, no moments so visceral you wanted to chuck your popcorn at the screen. It had only plot, and event after event whizzing by at breakneck speed, peopled with cigar store Indians rather than actors. If the Goblet of Fire was a big, dumb Michael Bay extravaganza, OOTP was a latter-day George Lucas mess, relying on techie trickery over any sort of narrative flow or power.
But perhaps the movie's single greatest affront is its lack of humor. Unlike the story as J.K. told it, the film is a murky gray blur of mind-numbing ennui. Sure there were dark and terrible things in the book, but there were also deliciously silly ones: the cupids at Madame Puddifoots, "Rescue Mission" name badges, bat bogey hexes, and Hogwarts' own Weasley Memorial Swamp. But in the movie? There's barely a bright moment, barely even the kind of cheap, throwaway laughs offered by some of the series' previous installments.
Although the script follows the book closely (to the point of even including a bunch of direct quotes), I don't think the new screenwriters really got it-the Harry Potter series is about relationships, every single bit as much as it's about magic. There is no camaraderie in the movie (see The Prisoner of Azkaban for how to handle this right), and it seems the characters barely even care about each other. This is especially easy to see in the scene where Voldemort possesses Harry in the Ministry of Magic. The point of this exercise was not for Harry to chew on scenery while giving a brief speech about how Voldemort sucks. The point was Dumbledore's love for Harry, and how he was unwilling to hurt his favorite student-not even when Voldemort gave him the opportunity to end it all, to save thousands of lives, just for the price of this one boy.
You can make excuses for it until the cows come home-It's a transitional movie! The director is new! The material in the book could never work on screen!-but the fast-forward world of OOTP does not live up to the grand, epic, and most of all personal book on which it is based. This is not J.K.'s fault; in other hands (see once again PoA) this film could have had meaning and spirit and heart.
But I guess you could say that the movie exactly like the book, post dementor's kiss, anyway: What should have been tense was perfunctory. What should have been terrifying was kind of cool. And what should have been breathtaking was just okay.