Mr.Chachee

So I thought this was probably the worst of the 5 HP movies so far. It had really bad pacing and spent a lot of time showing random scenes from the book that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the movies main plot. Everything felt rushed and poorly explained. I feel like if I hadn’t read the book, I would think the movie was even worse than it was, but I can’t tell.

My least favorite parts of the movie in no particular order. Sorry for the length:

-Hermione and Ron almost seemed like minor characters. Neville, Luna, Cho Chang, and even that little redhead guy seemed to have bigger parts than them. Hermione also is turning into a really bad actress.

-The movie featured way too many montages instead of actually having people talking or acting. There were about 5 different “newspaper” montages, the whole middle of the movie was basically an inter-spliced montage of Dumbledore’s Army training and Umbridge posting new rules or laying down the law. If you count Harry’s weird dream visions and his training with Snape as montages, there were no less than 10 montages in the whole movie, which seems a bit excessive (and really lazy of the director).

-The movie sort of picks and chooses random parts of the book to show on screen, and some of them make sense, while others just take away screen time from the main plot (which they really poorly explained). There was a Christmas scene with the Weasleys, but it really did nothing with the plot. There was the whole Seamus sidestory, which was done well, but why did they choose to focus so much on that and not more on the other weakly developed parts. They spent the first 20+ minutes going over Harry’s possible expulsion, which is really important, but felt like it dragged on too long. The Cho Chang kiss sort of happened then faded away with very little explanation.

-Speaking of which, Cho Chang just disappeared from the movie in the second half, and there were a few scenes where Harry & Co. were shown looking mad at her, but there were NO SPOKEN WORDS about it! The movie shows her being held captive by Malfoy when Umbridge finally breaks into the training room, clearly she did not willingly betray her friends. And yet, they spend the next 15-20 minutes sort of hinting that people are mad at her. Then finally they reveal “oh, she was sort of coerced into ratting on them” and Harry gives this knowing look to Hermione. That’s the plot? That’s all it took to wrap it up? It’s like the director really wanted to prove that he could convey a story without any spoken words, which I guess is nice, but….why??

-By far the most annoying part of the movie is the extensive screentime given to Prof. Trewlawny at the beginning, as if setting her character up for something big. In the book, she actually has a huge role, but I understand the books are different from the movies. Still, why bother building her up if she is completely absent from the second half of the movie? Yes, it was a very sad scene when she was getting kicked out of Hogwarts, but it’s another example of the director/writer just choosing random scenes from the book and throwing it into the movie.

-One of my favorite parts of this book is that we learn that 2 characters who were useless and cowardly joke characters were actually hugely important in the HP-Voldemort saga. Neville could have ended up exactly the same as Harry Potter, but Voldemort chose to kill Harry’s parents instead. Either Harry or Neville was destined to be Voldemort’s enemy, and that was prophesied by Prof. Trewlawney. I understand that the movie can’t do everything that’s in the book, so maybe both these tidbits are unimportant in the film. I could accept that if the film didn’t setup both these plots as if they were very important, but never actually explained them. We see Trelawney as a major character at the beginning, but then she never comes back, nor does Dumbledore explain that the prophecy is hers. We see Neville struggling with the torture of his parents, which happened on the same night Harry’s parents were killed. But then there’s no resolution. No connection between the plots there, so why bother starting them up at all? Why did Trewlawney even need to be in the movie???

-Finally, I felt like the visual effects in this movie were pretty bad. Parts were good, like the battle at the end, but a lot of it was cringingly bad. The centaurs and giant looked awful, they were sort of dark, blurry splotches on the screen. And the flying through London was just so blue-screeny, it made me sad. Speaking of which, that flying scene was another montage!

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