Order of the Phoenix Movie
...You know, I had no intention at all of going to see the Simpsons Movie, but damned if the cinema trailer doesn't make it look stupidly fun. (Why does the "spider-pig" thing crack me up so much? There's no reason to it, but I giggle every single time.)
But anyway, the film that I actually went to see:
On the whole I quite liked it; I thought they condensed the book as well as could reasonably be expected, without any really heinous additions or omissions, and it didn't feel as choppy as GoF. Although the ending definitely privileged cool visual effects over having the slightest frickin' clue what was going on. Aside from the death of Sirius, everything between the Order arriving and Harry fighting off the possession pretty much passed by in a fast-moving blur of "WTF?" for me.
(Admittedly, it may just be me. I'm not good at taking in visual information, and I don't so much 'watch' films as listen to the dialogue and pick up a vague impression of the most obviously signposted action. This is why I fail at reading comic books, appreciating visual comedy, and picking up alleged shippy subtext.)
Observations, in vaguely chronological order:
- Sweeping wheat fields, WTF? I admit I don't know Surrey, but Little Whinging is very much a residential suburb in the books, and also those fields were A, so not there in any of the previous films and B, entirely pointless.
- Damn, Richard Griffiths does not look well at all. I hope for his sake at least some of that was the makeup job.
- Boy, they're not even pretending to be canonical with the costumes at this stage, are they? I've made my peace with the random Muggle clothes on everybody, but Harry's extensive wardrobe of perfectly-fitting fashionable Muggle wear - including court suit! - definitely bugged.
- On a more positive note, everybody's haircuts were two hundred percent less stupid than in GoF. Big thumbs up there, hair department!
- I felt Tonks was introduced rather poorly; having her only clear line be that snap at Moody for calling her Nymphadora gave a pretty false impression of her personality. (Wasn't mad keen on the hair, either; I guess I pictured more of a vibrant, punk-ish do than the 'teenage girl with a packet of purple hair dye' vibe.) No opinion on the actress either way at this stage, since she didn't get to do much.
- Also, what was with Kingsley Shacklebolt and the Amazing Ethnic Costume of Much Stereotypical Ethnicity? Totally unnecessary, dudes. And who was the random bloke with no lines and a garden gnome hat meant to be? Sturgis Podmore?
- Sirius was more the mature and godfatherly GoF Sirius than what we saw in OotP the book; I guess his character arc had to be sacrificed in the story compression, but it made his calling Harry "James" in the final sequence very much out of left-field.
- Liked Kreacher, though he didn't get to serve any purpose but the "Hey, look, it's Kreacher," moment. By now these movies have definitely become The Cinematic Companion For People Who Already Know What's Going On Because They've Read the Books, but it's unavoidable with a book this long, and I think they did their best with it. (Unlike in PoA, where cutting out the backstory was ridiculous and not remotely necessary given the length of the story.)
- On a related note, though, would it have killed them to slap Regulus Black on the family tree? It didn't even need verbal acknowledgement, just a glimpse of the name in there somewhere so the R.A.B. thing doesn't come back to bite them. Because I suspect it will.
- I liked the courtroom set. Nice job showing the intimidation factor for the accused down in Harry's chair. But having Dumbledore call Voldemort "the Dark Lord" there was just careless.
- Voldemort in a suit was incongruous enough to be vaguely creepy in the original dream sequence, but when they kept flashing back to it in Occlumency/visions it just got progressively sillier.
- Talking of silliness, I appreciate that this film was less consciously goofy than the others. Nobody got stuck as designated comic relief, not even Hagrid, and the trio actually came across as a three-way friendship instead of hero!Harry, exposition!Hermione and comedy!Ron. Yay!
- I adored Luna. Thought the actress was fantastic and I loved all of her scenes with Harry. She was probably the best thing in the film. (And how much did I love the throwaway detail of her patronus being a rabbit?)
- Umbridge was not at all how I'd pictured her, and yet still great. Imelda Staunton is not an actress it would ever have occurred to me to cast in that role, but it totally worked. I was actually cringing in some of her scenes, and not in an inappropriate way. (That said, though, I actually thought some of her kitten plates were more genuinely cute than sickening. Alas, video footage of actual cats in motion is just never going to be as twee as those godawful chocolate box type pictures.)
- I was very impressed with the execution of Umbridge's quill; the letters cut into Harry's hand were realistic enough to be nasty. Probably the most disturbing thing in the film, and rightly so. (I'm glad that they put in McGonagall objecting to it, too, although in 'real' canon I'm sure she'd have done it in private instead of in front of the students.)
- A sad but understandable lack of Snape; there wasn't need or room to give him more scenes, and at least what we did get was gold. The tiny little snippet of Snape vs. Umbridge in the Potions classroom in particular. ("Obviously.") Snape's worst memory was given short shrift, but I appreciate that they touched on it at all. Alas, it flickered by too fast for me to form any impression of the flashback casting.
- I actually rather liked the montage approach to Umbridge's interference and Harry's teaching. It was a more graceful way to cover a lot of time and exposition than the choppy jumping from scene to scene we saw in GoF. They just pitched the little character snippets directly at the book fans instead of trying to cram all the supporting explanation in there, and I think it worked best that way. Though I can't guess how well it would come off to the casual viewer.
- Hee, Ron called someone a "tosspot"! Big points for totally taking me back to my senior school days - that is such a teenage insult. (For those taking notes on Brit slang, it's a variant on "tosser", which is in itself a milder form of "wanker".)
- I quite liked how they handled Dumbledore's avoidance of Harry, culminating in the "Look at me!" in the office. Harry came off rather more sympathetically here than he did for me in the book, I guess because they cut out all the sulking and brooding and capslock of rage and pared that plotline down to its bare essentials.
- That Veil in the Department of Mysteries was really kind of... gauzy, wasn't it? What, death by drapery wasn't undignified enough, they had to make it death by net curtain? I was really picturing more of a Dementor's cloak/shroud type dark and ominous thing.
- As I say, the climactic action sequences were all a bit of a confused blur to me. And the whole zipping about the place in puffs of black and white smoke was just... odd. Bellatrix was convincingly nutty, but I thought Voldemort himself was pretty underused compared to his creepy debut in GoF. Rather a flat ending, really.
- Fudge's "He's back!" got a "Well done!" and a sarcastic round of applause in my cinema.
Looking back on this, I seem to have listed a lot of little niggles, but they were just that... little. All in all I quite enjoyed it and I thought it was about as decent an adaptation as you could reasonably expect, so I'm pretty happy.
But anyway, the film that I actually went to see:
On the whole I quite liked it; I thought they condensed the book as well as could reasonably be expected, without any really heinous additions or omissions, and it didn't feel as choppy as GoF. Although the ending definitely privileged cool visual effects over having the slightest frickin' clue what was going on. Aside from the death of Sirius, everything between the Order arriving and Harry fighting off the possession pretty much passed by in a fast-moving blur of "WTF?" for me.
(Admittedly, it may just be me. I'm not good at taking in visual information, and I don't so much 'watch' films as listen to the dialogue and pick up a vague impression of the most obviously signposted action. This is why I fail at reading comic books, appreciating visual comedy, and picking up alleged shippy subtext.)
Observations, in vaguely chronological order:
- Sweeping wheat fields, WTF? I admit I don't know Surrey, but Little Whinging is very much a residential suburb in the books, and also those fields were A, so not there in any of the previous films and B, entirely pointless.
- Damn, Richard Griffiths does not look well at all. I hope for his sake at least some of that was the makeup job.
- Boy, they're not even pretending to be canonical with the costumes at this stage, are they? I've made my peace with the random Muggle clothes on everybody, but Harry's extensive wardrobe of perfectly-fitting fashionable Muggle wear - including court suit! - definitely bugged.
- On a more positive note, everybody's haircuts were two hundred percent less stupid than in GoF. Big thumbs up there, hair department!
- I felt Tonks was introduced rather poorly; having her only clear line be that snap at Moody for calling her Nymphadora gave a pretty false impression of her personality. (Wasn't mad keen on the hair, either; I guess I pictured more of a vibrant, punk-ish do than the 'teenage girl with a packet of purple hair dye' vibe.) No opinion on the actress either way at this stage, since she didn't get to do much.
- Also, what was with Kingsley Shacklebolt and the Amazing Ethnic Costume of Much Stereotypical Ethnicity? Totally unnecessary, dudes. And who was the random bloke with no lines and a garden gnome hat meant to be? Sturgis Podmore?
- Sirius was more the mature and godfatherly GoF Sirius than what we saw in OotP the book; I guess his character arc had to be sacrificed in the story compression, but it made his calling Harry "James" in the final sequence very much out of left-field.
- Liked Kreacher, though he didn't get to serve any purpose but the "Hey, look, it's Kreacher," moment. By now these movies have definitely become The Cinematic Companion For People Who Already Know What's Going On Because They've Read the Books, but it's unavoidable with a book this long, and I think they did their best with it. (Unlike in PoA, where cutting out the backstory was ridiculous and not remotely necessary given the length of the story.)
- On a related note, though, would it have killed them to slap Regulus Black on the family tree? It didn't even need verbal acknowledgement, just a glimpse of the name in there somewhere so the R.A.B. thing doesn't come back to bite them. Because I suspect it will.
- I liked the courtroom set. Nice job showing the intimidation factor for the accused down in Harry's chair. But having Dumbledore call Voldemort "the Dark Lord" there was just careless.
- Voldemort in a suit was incongruous enough to be vaguely creepy in the original dream sequence, but when they kept flashing back to it in Occlumency/visions it just got progressively sillier.
- Talking of silliness, I appreciate that this film was less consciously goofy than the others. Nobody got stuck as designated comic relief, not even Hagrid, and the trio actually came across as a three-way friendship instead of hero!Harry, exposition!Hermione and comedy!Ron. Yay!
- I adored Luna. Thought the actress was fantastic and I loved all of her scenes with Harry. She was probably the best thing in the film. (And how much did I love the throwaway detail of her patronus being a rabbit?)
- Umbridge was not at all how I'd pictured her, and yet still great. Imelda Staunton is not an actress it would ever have occurred to me to cast in that role, but it totally worked. I was actually cringing in some of her scenes, and not in an inappropriate way. (That said, though, I actually thought some of her kitten plates were more genuinely cute than sickening. Alas, video footage of actual cats in motion is just never going to be as twee as those godawful chocolate box type pictures.)
- I was very impressed with the execution of Umbridge's quill; the letters cut into Harry's hand were realistic enough to be nasty. Probably the most disturbing thing in the film, and rightly so. (I'm glad that they put in McGonagall objecting to it, too, although in 'real' canon I'm sure she'd have done it in private instead of in front of the students.)
- A sad but understandable lack of Snape; there wasn't need or room to give him more scenes, and at least what we did get was gold. The tiny little snippet of Snape vs. Umbridge in the Potions classroom in particular. ("Obviously.") Snape's worst memory was given short shrift, but I appreciate that they touched on it at all. Alas, it flickered by too fast for me to form any impression of the flashback casting.
- I actually rather liked the montage approach to Umbridge's interference and Harry's teaching. It was a more graceful way to cover a lot of time and exposition than the choppy jumping from scene to scene we saw in GoF. They just pitched the little character snippets directly at the book fans instead of trying to cram all the supporting explanation in there, and I think it worked best that way. Though I can't guess how well it would come off to the casual viewer.
- Hee, Ron called someone a "tosspot"! Big points for totally taking me back to my senior school days - that is such a teenage insult. (For those taking notes on Brit slang, it's a variant on "tosser", which is in itself a milder form of "wanker".)
- I quite liked how they handled Dumbledore's avoidance of Harry, culminating in the "Look at me!" in the office. Harry came off rather more sympathetically here than he did for me in the book, I guess because they cut out all the sulking and brooding and capslock of rage and pared that plotline down to its bare essentials.
- That Veil in the Department of Mysteries was really kind of... gauzy, wasn't it? What, death by drapery wasn't undignified enough, they had to make it death by net curtain? I was really picturing more of a Dementor's cloak/shroud type dark and ominous thing.
- As I say, the climactic action sequences were all a bit of a confused blur to me. And the whole zipping about the place in puffs of black and white smoke was just... odd. Bellatrix was convincingly nutty, but I thought Voldemort himself was pretty underused compared to his creepy debut in GoF. Rather a flat ending, really.
- Fudge's "He's back!" got a "Well done!" and a sarcastic round of applause in my cinema.
Looking back on this, I seem to have listed a lot of little niggles, but they were just that... little. All in all I quite enjoyed it and I thought it was about as decent an adaptation as you could reasonably expect, so I'm pretty happy.