MaW’s Blog

I have just seen the film. This entry comprises a spoiler-filled review of it. If you do not know the plot, do not read on. Go and read the book instead.

If you have not seen the film and are intending to go, I strongly recommend that you also go and read the book instead. Especially if you have read the book already, or have any interest in continuity or internal consistency.

Now, read on for the rest of it. I say again, the following is filled with spoilers.

Okay so I’ll admit I was excited to go and see the film. New director, a chance to make up for the mistakes of the first two films and really show the world of Harry Potter in the truest way possible.

Needless to say I should have known it was too good a hope to actually be fulfilled.

It begins with a very pretty variation on the Warner Brothers logo. Nice. Classy. The familiar music. Then some weird pulsing noise, and a flashing light to go with it. Harry, it appears, is attempting to learn a spell to make lots of light (Lumos Maximus, unsurprisingly enough) under the sheets in his bedroom at the Dursley’s house. One wonders why he can get away with this, when the second book and film showed us that a house elf using a Hover charm nearly gets Harry expelled. This is especially bad as Harry mentions later whilst talking to Fudge that it’s illegal for him to use magic at home.

Move on to the arrival of Aunt Marge. Harry losing his temper and the shattering wine glass was very well done I’ll admit, but then the actual inflation of Marge was far too comic to be acceptable — NOT helped by the score, which was far below the standard of the previous two films. This one’s supposed to be much darker than the previous two, not a parody of them.

And even when Aunt Marge floats away into the sky (a minor plot modification), no owls arrive. Harry storms out of the house of course, sees Sirius the dog (after a totally unnecessary and completely pointless and stupid little windstorm), nearly gets killed by the Knight Bus and then we’re treated to scenes of it rushing around the country to some hideous soundtrack that really makes you wonder if you’ve accidentally started watching the Keystone Kops.

Harry also didn’t see Sirius Black on the Muggle news. He finds out about him from the paper on the bus, as is expected, but nobody mentions the whole killed thirteen people with one curse thing. Which I would have thought is rather important. Stan Shaunpike also not a particularly well-realised character, and the bus driver and that ridiculous talking head… well, I won’t say any more.

Fudge was moderately well done. That was okay, but Harry didn’t stay a couple of weeks in Diagon Alley; conveniently it was the day before he had to go back to Hogwarts anyway. That smelled of contrivance.

Also, why did Mr. Weasley take Harry aside to tell him about Black being after him? Harry is supposed to overhear that, although admittedly Mr. Weasley tries to tell him later on, I think overhearing would have been a better presentation of it.

Oh, and the Leaky Cauldron’s rooms are supposed to be comfortable, not dusty, noisy and horrible.

And now we come to the Dementors. Oh the Dementors. Why did they feel it was necessary to make them capable of flight? Aren’t they scary enough as it is? And why were their mouths frequently visible, when a whole part of the Dementor thing is that nobody knows what’s under the hood, except those who’ve fallen victim to the Dementor’s Kiss?

Lupin didn’t put in a good performance on the train either. He woke up, bounced into action and performed the Patronus charm just a little too conveniently for my liking. Not to mention that he’s supposed to wake up when the train stops, not when Harry’s just passing out. That strikes me as a pointless modification.

Another modification that was exceptionally irritating was the school choir. Firstly, although I’m sure Hogwarts has one, we do not see it in any of the first five books. Secondly, they were single ‘double double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble’ and so forth. Hello? People with brains here? That is in no way what they would sing at Hogwarts, I am sure.

I also suspect that even if they did sing it, they wouldn’t sound like professionally-trained singers whilst doing so. Or is there a charm for improving one’s singing voice? The accompaniment by giant toads was interesting, but given that the whole bit was unnecessary, I’d have much preferred to hear the school song which they missed out of the first film.

Dawn French put in a good performance as the Fat Lady, and was so good that I’m willing to accept the slight modification to her, as it did no harm to the plot, and might have been good in the book itself, in fact, although perhaps works better as a visual joke.

All the school uniforms look scruffier in this film, which is more realistic. Shirts untucked, ties in a mess and so on, which is pretty good all told. We should not, however, EVER see the chain Hermione’s wearing around her neck with the Time Turner on it, or the little hints they kept dropping that she was appearing out of nowhere. In the book she’s much cleverer than that at keeping people from noticing what she was doing.

The Maurauder’s Map was pretty. Changing the little dots to footprints was actually a nice touch. I liked that.

What I did not like is what they did with it. Harry is looking at it one night with the most visually impressive Lumos charm (the one that makes the tip of your wand glow), when he sees Peter Pettigrew on it. Now it is perhaps an oversight in the books that he didn’t show up on it before, as we know he was in the grounds all the time and the map’s supposed to cover all of them. I thought for a while that it was also an oversight in the fourth book when it didn’t show Mad-Eye Moody as Bartemious Crouch all the time, but then I realised that Polyjuice Potion must fool it, and we only see him as Crouch on the map when he’s stealing potion ingredients to make more. But enough of the fourth book.

Now Lupin recognises the map instantly, but not only does Harry fail to ask how, Lupin also fails to mention that he wrote it along with Harry’s father (and Peter Pettigrew and Sirius Black of course). This started off a long bit of total lack of regard for most of the backstory, which meant that large parts of the rest of the film changed, and not much of it made any sense anymore.

Harry doesn’t see Sirius at the Quidditch match, he sees a dog shape in the clouds before flying Dementors start assaulting him. The Firebolt doesn’t turn up until the end, after they know Sirius is innocent, and has a single Hippogriff feather packed with it so they know who sent it. The second Quidditch match doesn’t happen at all.

Buckbeak’s trial and execution came out of nowhere, although Hagrid’s suit and tie were quite as awful as expected. The execution was overdone — we see a really slow shot of MacNair raising his axe and swinging it down, far too overblown… would’ve been better to only show what they see in the book, which is nothing at all, they just hear the sound of the axe falling and assume the worst.

The Shrieking Shack happened too quickly. I shall say no more about the plot changes here, as they were implied by the earlier ones anyway.

The werewolf didn’t look enough like a wolf. I got the impression from the book that it’s supposed to be hard to tell them apart, yet this one looked like a hairy person. Think a CG version of the werewolves on Buffy and you might come close.

Sirius in dog form keeping Lupin in wolf form away from the children was nicely animated.

The proper Patronus charm which saves Harry from the Dementors took far too long and wasn’t right. The stag barely featured, but I suppose without all the animagus backstory, it would have been mildly inexplicable. Which it was really, as it was still shown for a while, although the Dementors were repelled by pulses of light, not by the stag charging them.

Harry and Hermione’s rescue of Sirius and Buckbeak was close enough. It fitted in with the rest of the film, I suppose. Why move Sirius from the Charms classroom to a prison cell on top of a tower? Why would Hogwarts have prison cells? And if it did, wouldn’t they be in the dungeons? The top of a tower is far too convenient a place for rescue by Hippogriff.

And as a final point, the director appears to have a fondness for the camera following falling leaves, feathers, petals, birds or indeed anything else that moves downwards at a moderate kind of pace and can be followed by the camera (whether real or computer generated) from one scene to another.

Oh, and why does everything freeze when the Dementors come past? That’s supposed to be a metaphor.

Oliver Wood, Alicia Spinnet, Angelina Johnson and Katie Bell were all nowhere to be seen except as brief glimpses during the Quidditch match.

Why does the Snitch always taunt the Seekers in the film? It deliberately hovers in front of their faces then runs away, rather than waiting to be spotted. Maybe it didn’t like the weather either.

Okay, I really am going to stop now. Just don’t go and see it.