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Harry Potter - Entertaining yet disappointing

 
ranger
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Well this morning, my wife and I saw the newest Harry Potter movie. She had NOT read the book, but I had.

I found that I was entertained, but I am very disappointed in how they changed the story, cut things, and rushed through the movie. I couldn't believe how fast paced this movie was.

If this one was that fast-paced, I can't imagine how they are going to do the next movies.

Mark
 
High Plains Drifter
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I think it's pretty clear from the size of books 3-5 that literal retellings might not fare that well in the theaters.

My kids both liked it, even though some things were clearly very different.

The reinvention of landscape I thought made sense, even though it was jarring at first. The expansive, graded, universally well-lit courtyards of the first two films, for example, make almost everything non-threatening. Even the entrance to Aragog's lair has that unearthly blue light to it that nonetheless suggests everything's going to be ok.

I thought the time-turning business was captured particularly well.

I didn't really care for the reduction of Malfoy to a simpering coward. What I would have wanted, as a director, is to show his increasing frustration at being marginalized by Potter's prominence and exploits. I mean, c'mon, he's absolutely no threat to a boy who's faced Voldemort twice on one level. On another, schoolboy to schoolboy -- Malfoy gets his digs in in Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix, and I would have liked to see hints of that here.

In retrospect, I think Prisoner of Azkaban could have been tedious and routine if it had been done the same way. I think a change in direction was a good idea. That said, I'm still deciding if I like all the liberties taken with the novel.
 
author
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From the perspective of someone who hasn't read the books...

I thought it was great! I noticed that it borrowed a lot of 'look and feel' from LOTR, maybe the special effects community just does that. Perhaps there's a formula that can estimate how long it will take on screen to properly render a page of a good book... from such a formula we could predict whether a given book will be chopped up, or should be made into 2 movies.
 
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Good movie. The special effects were done well. While they deviated from the story (aka left stuff out), I didn't feel they left out anything too important.
 
Michael Ernest
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I thought they should have found a way to explain the references to Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs. Without that, Harry's expelliarmus of Snape in the Shrieking Shack seems like a bit of misplaced revenge.

Til now in the movies they've toned down Snape's animus towards Harry, which in the books gets increasingly pronounced (with reason, though) and venomous. By the time Harry socks it to him in the book, it's a mixed thing. You have to feel like Snape's had it coming for a while, but at the same time it serves an important purpose. In the movie that mixed bag is less evident. You wouldn't think the Snape of film would simply dismiss the blow.

I'm probably more into this right now because my son wants the Star Wars trilogy on DVD, but in that production they modify certain events, such as the bounty hunter firing first at Han Solo in the bar, which change the edge of that character -- rather dramatically. Sucks that you can get the original story on VHS but not on DVD.
 
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such as the bounty hunter firing first at Han Solo in the bar

Small hijack here: That was the most pathetic thing Lucas ever did and should have clued us all in on what was to come with Episodes I, II, and III.
 
blacksmith
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I finally saw it. (It was just a matter of time, given that my wife is a big enough fan of the series to have both the American and British hardcovers of each book so far.)

I thought they must have left stuff out, but I just skimmed through the book again, and all the major events were retained in the movie. The stuff that was left out was mostly minor detail. I guess it's books 4 and 5 that are really thick.

I did feel the movie was a bit more mundane than the first two. The special effects were good, the characterization was good ... I think the problem was that Hogwarts seems to have inexplicably changed their dress code to require muggle clothing.
 
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