I caught the new Harry Potter movie this weekend. I was very excited and couldn’t wait to watch it. I was never a big fan of it watching the first few movies, but then I started reading it, and it’s great. This was by far my favorite book and I wasn’t let down by the film. I loved it, and it is the best in the series. A few things had me worried about it. The book was the first one in the series to be really chunky. We’re talking over 700 pages. So major cutting had to be done to get this to fit into a movie. I am glad that they were able to get a 2 hour and 45 minute movie out of it as I expected the studio would want a shorter film. I am also glad that they didn’t compromise the material and earned the first PG-13 rating in the series. All this going in had me confident that the creators are serious about this film.
Quite a bit of material was sacrificed to make the length of the film. All previous films had Harry start at his home with the Dursleys. This film completely skipped that part, a part which was quite humorous, but understandably unecessary. In fact almost a third of the book was skimmed over in about the first 15 minutes or so. Most of it was not important for the main plot, but I can’t help but miss it, and at that point of the movie it feels really rushed. The only content that I’m disappointed about is the part in the maze near the end of the movie. It just really wasn’t as exciting as the book.
Another issue I had was Michael Gambon’s performance of Dumbledore. I just thought it was way off. Dumbledore was too emotional and all over the place, while the book’s version was usually calm and collected. I liked the Richard Harris portrayal more but he was too stiff at times. In between the two would be perfect.
This was the first of the series to do without John Williams’ music. They opted for a British composer as well as director for the first time. The music didn’t really stand out to me, it even felt wrong sometimes, giving the wrong cue for scenes in the movie. There also wasn’t a strong musical theme anywhere. John Williams tends to have some catchy thematic piece for certain scenes and it seemed missing from this film. British director Mike Newell was the director for the film. I didn’t know how he would handle it as he had never done any kind of movie with special effects or of this genre. But it was pretty well done for the most part.
Although I’ve been pointing out all the faults, I only do so because of my expectations and adoration of the source. I loved everything else about the movie. Mad-eye Moody was perfect. Voldemort was awesome. Graveyard scene was just how I pictured it. The first two tasks are great, I only was left disappointed by the third task because of the lack of creatures and details. Snape was awesome, but not enough of him around. The Twins were hilarious and were most of the humor of the movie. A lot of the stuff in the previous films were cut down in this film. Much of Hogwarts itself is missing: the password to enter the door where the fat lady painting is, in fact most of the animated paintings weren’t there, no ghosts floating around the school except Myrtle, very little classroom time and thus very little of the various professors, you get very little idea of what classes they were taking, no visiting Hagrid’s or going out to Hogsmeade. If you haven’t seen the previous films, you don’t get much sense of their environment at school. Of course, much of these are details we know are there we just don’t get to see it, and it’s ok because there was so much other stuff to cover.
I guess my main complaint is I couldn’t get enough of it. Other than the music and the Dumbledore performance, all that was needed was more and more material. But of course we can’t always have it all. Here’s hoping for an extended DVD.