I had no intention of seeing two movies in the same day, but since Malaya was buying for my belated b-day event, and since we were both kind of depressed/dismayed by how stupid Transformers was, we thought what the hell. So off to Harry Potter we went, after gorging on Chinese food. This review assumes you've read up through HP5, so if you haven't you might want to skip this, since it'll be casually spoilery.
I'll preface this review by saying that I've read book 5 twice, though not since shortly before book 6 was released two (?) years ago. As such I had no trouble following the plot and found myself mentally filling in the blanks the abbreviated script leaves. My review is written very much as someone who knew the story and felt relatively fondly towards it. I have no idea what a person who hadn't seen the other films and/or at least read book 5 would have thought about this film, but I doubt it would have made very much sense. Read
Ebert's review for the sort of questions a person who hasn't read the book would ask. I don’t know if he's read it or not, but he wrote his review as though he hasn't, which is probably why he's the best known living movie critic and I'm writing this on a blog for people who are more interested in me going on another tirade about other
Hellgate: London fansites.
Anyway, to the scores, with my biases clearly stated:
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 8
Action: 6
Eye Candy: 7
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 7
Overall: 7
Harry Potter 5 was kind of the opposite of Transformers for me. Very little variation in the scores, with everything good, but not great. I liked the movie. I didn't love it, much of it felt rushed, things that were cut out and simplified were missed, but I liked the plot growing darker and more serious, the special effects were very nice, the wizard battle at the end was good, the acting was almost uniformly excellent, etc. Again, this is all as someone who knew the plot from the books and who had seen the HP2 and HP3 movies just last week on cable. (But not HP4, which would have helped since I didn't really remember how that one ended to lead into this one.) I do not think someone who didn't know the series very well would enjoy this very much, with their confusion outweighing their fun.
Script/Story: 7Way, way, condensed. Lots of stuff was left in almost as a kind of Easter Egg for the reader come to the film. There was a very brief shot of the previous house gnomes petrified under glass jars in the front walkway of Sirius' house, which I only noticed since I remembered and liked that touch in the book. So much else was skimmed over, from the invisible carriage pulling winged horses, to the ongoing slander of Harry by the paper, to Loopy girl's dad's tabloid doing the real truth, to Loopy's mixture of imagined (or are they?) bogies and snarks, to Harry's nascent romance with Cho, to the communications with Sirius through the fire, to the ways Ron's older brothers resist Umbridge's stifling rules, to Harry's psychic link to Voldemort and his efforts to control his memories with Snape's cruel tutelage, etc.
The movie could profitably have been an hour longer and still hardly gotten beneath the surface of the plot elements in the 5th book, and this one would definitely benefit from a LotR-like 45 minutes of added footage on a super DVD, but for what it was, it wasn't bad.
Acting/Casting: 8The kids are still doing pretty well, though they're clearly not as good at acting as the adults, who are pretty much a who's who of great British actors. How Judy Dench hasn't shown up in some role yet is beyond me, but every other living British thespian has glued on some warts and a fright wig and done a turn in the Harry Potter series. The only two that seemed a bit off to me were Harry's adopted brother, and Dumbledore. The brother is aging and looking less corpulent and idiotic, and I'm not sure the kid playing him can act at all. Maybe he can, but my thought after his amateurish early turn was that they cast him when he was like 8, and now he's 17 and maybe isn't even acting anymore, but they don't want to cast some new kid for reasons of continuity, plus they figure Dudikins is only on screen for about 2 minutes a movie at this point, so it hardly matters. Unfortunately it's always the first 2 minutes, and starting off with the worst acting isn't the best technique to suck in the viewer.
As for Dumbledore, I know the original actor croaked 3 movies ago and this is the replacement, and I don't think he sucks, or that the original guy was better, but the character has gotten less imposing and magisterial with each movie. He's now more like the crazy uncle, (Sirius actually is the crazy uncle, and he's got far more presence) and his fashions have gone very "aging hippy," which doesn't help. Dumbledore was basically wearing shiny women's gowns for this whole movie, and they're way too form-fitting to his rotund, old man shape. They desperately need shoulder pads and a girdle. He can be decorated and bearded and wizard-metrosexual, but his figure is awful. Remember how Gandalf was always robed and shrouded, but still very masculine in LotR? Dumbledore needs some of that to give him some authority.
Action: 6There's not much action, hence the score. I was fine without any quidditch, and the very ending wand battle was pretty cool, but the whole concluding action sequence was greatly abbreviated from the book, to its detriment. We hardly got to see any of the Order vs. the Death Eaters, and the scenes with the kids vs. the Death Eaters weren't real convincing. I was also disappointed in how little we saw of the anarchy at school stuff, and Ron's brothers' wacky gizmos and gimmicks.
Eye Candy: 6It's more of the Hogwarts we've seen for 5 movies now, and while the big wand battle had the best graphics we've yet seen in the series, and the various practicing Pretorius charm effects were very cool and smoky, this was one of the more visually blah movies in the series. No dragons or sea monsters, only 2 dementors, and Hagrid's half brother giant was super CG-looking. Like something out of Roger Rabbit.
Fun Factor: 6It's very plot-heavy and full of exposition. I enjoyed it, but it's far from light hearted.
Replayability: 7I'd see it again. The whole series of films has grown on me quite a bit, since I was bored through the first two tedious films, before I'd read any of the books.
Overall: 7Not great, but competent. As I keep saying.
On another topic, I was wondering about this after the movie yesterday. This is kind of a spoiler for book 6 if you've not read that one yet, but my question is how they're going to handle Malfoy in movie 6. The younger Malfoy, I mean. As you know if you've read book 6, he is expected to do something instrumental and enormously important in the climax of the book, and in reading it there was a lot of suspense as to whether or not he would. I wasn't sure which way it would go, and it was a scene of great tension.
It worked because Malfoy has always been a pretty major figure in the books, and while he's faded from his position as Harry's rival, as he was in books 1 and 2, he's still a major pain in the ass in the books. And not just as a lying little shit; he's scheming and pretty strong in magic and dangerous with his evil dad's backing. In the movies though, Malfoy has been reduced to a little bitch who is usually a punch line and who always loses out to any sign of determination by Harry or his friends. Malfoy is good for a few nasty remarks early on, but he always gets pwned in the clutch, and usually runs off crying.
In movie 3 Malfoy teases Harry about fainting at the Dementors, then acts a fool and gets his arm broken by Buckbeak and exits the scene sobbing. Later on he gets hit with snowballs and humiliated by invisible Harry in town, and runs off crying and knocking over his friends. Finally, he gloats over Hagrid's misery, then immediately snivels and begs when Hermoine points her wand at him. To cap it off she punches him with her little bird arm and he goes down, then runs away crying.
In movie 4 he did some other bitchery; I can't remember at this point.
In movie 5 he's hardly there at all. He does his patented taunting early on as they arrive at school, then is only seen again getting his Informer Brigade badge, then joins in the failing to find the magical practice room. He's not punched out by a girl and he doesn't cry when hit with a snowball or threatened, but he does nothing to distinguish himself.
My point here is that with Malfoy's screentime cut so much in movies 3-5, and his character turned into more of a one dimensional bully who runs the instant he's pushed back, I can't see how it will be believable when he's supposed to be a dark, nearly murderous young wizard in movie 6. Who will believe that he can pull the trigger when he needs to, when we've seen him played as such a bitch for 3 straight films?
I guess time will tell...
Labels: harry potter, movie review
