Brian A. Thomas .com

We saw the new Harry Potter the other day during the midnight showing. Plenty of people dressed in uniforms and other costumes. However, this isn’t really a post on how a girl in a white dress shirt with a tie on can be hot, this is a quick movie review. There may be spoilers, so if you haven’t read the book, it may be best to skip it.
First, how is it that the longest, and so far best, book in the series ended up with the shortest run time?
I hated the director, and unfortunately he is doing the next movie as well. Way too many they turned to using shots of newspapers to transition from one scene to the next, although that is probably a problem with the script in that case. However, what I think we can lay on the director was all the times they would pull out from a scene to show the castle, then push back in on the next scene, and these two devices seemed to take up too many scene transitions.
They cut Snape’s worst memory way too short. Never mind the general change on how Harry got the memory, but they really needed to show much more of it, especially the part of how Snape treated Lilly and more of how Harry’s dad did this kind of stuff to Snape all the time to show just how much of a jerk Harry’s dad really was in those old days.
In the book, only Harry gets caught having classes in the Room of Requirements. For some reason in the movie, they all get caught and then all have detention using Umbrage’s special quills. I would have dropped the whole detention scene and expanded Snape’s Worst Memory.
Sara and some others feel they didn’t do enough to establish why Umbrage was there (for those who didn’t read the book), I thought that was covered in one of the 20 million newspaper transitions, but I may be wrong as she isn’t alone in that thought, and that the movie may be confusing to those who didn’t read the books.
There wasn’t nearly enough stuff at the Department of Mysteries at the end. They could easily filled another 30 minutes there alone and it would have been well spent.
Perhaps another 15 to 30 minutes to fill out the rest of the movie and even the pacing out and not be so jumpy. It would have made for a long movie, but 3 hour Harry Potter movies isn’t something unheard of, and this is the longest book so give it more time. Yes, I know I mentioned the time in my first point, but this is perhaps the biggest problem with the movie, it wasn’t given the time to develop properly, and ended up being jumpy with too much taken away that is really central to the main story. Heck I would have done 3 1/2 hours for the theatrical, and perhaps nearly 4 for the Director’s Cut.
Having thought things over, I have to agree with Sara and others that they spent too much time with the Umbrage story line, and they dropped certain elements of her that would have explained a few other things as well… again a problem with cutting the movie so short.

What was handled right? Well, all the kids seem to be getting better. The girl who played Luna was right on and loved ever scene with her and wish they had done more with her. I thought Umbrage was spot on as well, making you hate her and be glad when she gets hers in the end, just like the book. The battle was cool, but was again, cut way too short. The girls at the theater with the ties… oh wait, the movie had nothing to do with that….

Not an overly bad movie, just not nearly as good as it should have been. Not near the top of the Harry Potter movies, and time will tell if it is at the bottom or not. Repeated viewings may rise it up, but as of now, I think the 3rd movie remains the best, and the 5th book remains the best of the books (we’ll see in a couple weeks if it is replaced by 7).

Tags: Movies