Film Review: "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"
God...Where do I start?? I'm still in some disbelief of how fucking good it actually was! Seriously. It is, by far, my favorite of all of the movies so far. But as usual, I will start by getting my negative comments out of the way and then get on to the worship of Mr. Yates.
The Bad
Snape's Worst Very Brief Random Memory - You know, I could talk a whole lot about how much it sucks that we didn't get any explanation of the memory, that it lasted so shortly I don't really remember what all we saw except a little bit of James and lots of broody emo Snape, and that after everybody freaking out about the casting of characters like Lily and Sirius as teenagers we did not see them at all. But it's actually kind of amazing how at that point I didn't much care. Unlike with PoA and GoF, I had been yet to see a scene where I thought, They had to have THAT shit in here but couldn't include ____ from the book, so I could see how interfering it might have been in a movie that already seemed to drag a little. That I wasn't too disappointed once that scene was suddenly over, when that was one of the greatest parts of the book, tells how much I was enjoying the movie. That couldn't even ruin it.
Did she say Avada Kedevra?! - Okay, people. I'm going a little off the topic of just the movie a minute to get up on my soap box to bitchily and opinionatedly state something here because I'm sick of seeing people express their total misunderstanding of this part of the book. LET'S GET SOMETHING STRAIGHT ONCE AND FOR ALL. THEN IT WILL BE THE END OF THIS DISCUSSION FOREVER (unfortunately I'm sure not really...).
- FACT: When you are hit with the Killing Curse, you don't have the chance to stand there looking surprised and realizing what happened to you before you finally fall dead. You're killed immediately and just plop to the ground in a second. As it is written in the book, Sirius clearly does not die immediately after Bella's curse hits him.
CONCLUSION: Whatever curse she used on him, it was not Avada Kedavra.
- FACT: There are other curses you can use on someone in a fight that can kill them besides Adava Kedavra. Just look what Harry did to Draco in the bathroom scene in HBP. And remember how Harry was about to kill Sirius in PoA, knowing exactly what spell he could use to do it, when this was before he even knew about the Unforgivable Curses? Avada Kedavra simply has the distinction of being a curse that instantly kills someone and cannot be blocked, and would not necessarily have to be aimed right at somebody's chest or anything.
CONCLUSION: Bellatrix's curse that she used on Sirius, which did hit him "squarely in the chest," could have been (and I think definitely was) what killed him.
- FACTS: The room in the Department of Mysteries with the veil is called the Death Chamber, implying that this room may have once been used for executions. Remus stops Harry from running through the veil after Sirius, so it is probably something dangerous which you cannot return from.
CONCLUSION: Although Sirius was almost certainly already dead or dying before he fell through the veil (judging, if from nothing else, the look on his face before he falls backwards), the veil is some kind of representation of death as well as maybe a passageway to the world of the dead, and falling through it on accident would probably have killed him even if he hadn't just been hurt with a curse. I think the veil is there in his death scene just to make it that much more dramatic, and also give the first major death in the series an extra feeling of (slightly frustrating) mystery with the absence of a body as well as add a strong implication that Sirius has kept on living in some kind of afterlife (Luna's comment about the voices heard behind the veil as well as the simple image of him just passing through to another place, I think, achieve this).
SECOND CONCLUSION: Sirius's death is not lame. JKR is not lame like that. He was not stupidly killed off by accidentally falling through some fucking curtain. There's kinda more to it than that.
- FACT: In the movie, Bellatrix kills Sirius with the Killing Curse.
CONCLUSION: This one part in the movie was a huge fuck-up that is now only going to perpetuate the completely WRONG point of view of so many fans, and it kind of ruins the mysteriousness of how he dies and makes the veil pointless. Arrrrgh!!
Random Little Things
- The Department of Mysteries was pretty cool, but did not have that total batshit chaos that those chapters in the book had. I wish they could have also shown the room with all the clocks and hourglasses and Ron getting attacked by the weird brain, and all that totally weird stuff. I loved how all of that stuff came up in the book and was kept sort of unexplained.
- No more Remus than that?? :( No more Tonks than that? No more general Order of the Phoenix coolness than that?
- The veil...um...was not even a veil. Come on. It should have been the coolest-looking, most ancient-looking piece of fabric you've ever seen, moving a little sort of like it's alive and being all creepy. This looked like some kind of liquidy time portal out of a science fiction movie. WTF.
- Bellatrix kind of bothered me. I like Helena Bonham Carter but never thought she was a very good choice for Bella. She was acting like herself in several other movies instead of very much like the character. I hated how she actually acted all scared after Harry knocked her down. What the hell was up with that? One of the only moments of her acting I liked was when she crazily shouted at Harry for saying Lord V's name. But as a whole her performance just seemed kinda...uneven and indecisive.
- When I heard some of the score online, I thought it sounded really good, but I just thought it didn't work so well in the movie. It never really seemed to enhance the feeling of what was happening when it was playing, and there also were too many times it felt like music was needed and it was just so quiet.
The Good
Haaaarry - Before seeing this, I had skimmed through a scathing review saying that Daniel Radcliffe's inability to perform the right level of emotion in this movie basically ruined it. Now I can't believe somebody would think that. Dan is definitely better in this one than all the others. And I was actually sort of creeped out in the scene when he was being possessed by Voldemort. Damn.
David Yates - I was completely blown away by the directing of this one. Yates just seemed to allow the film to move through this universe with so much ease. There were all these little details, like opening a scene with a bird's-eye-view of Dumbledore's office and a close-up of Fawkes sitting above it, or actually giving us the information that it is an unusually hot summer in a way that doesn't dwell on it like it's terribly important, that somehow added a sense of realism to the movie and a casual familiarity with the setting and story despite this being the director's first Potter flick. (We even saw Aberforth Dumbledore and the freaking goat, when only a totally hardcore fan would get the joke behind that!) He puts all of the magical stuff in the background so that it can be more of a movie about people and relationships. This is the first Harry Potter movie that I've ever seen and then been able to think to myself that it was a beautiful film, because Yates succeeded in actually making it emotionally effective as well as just entertaining and funny.
As great a job as Alfonso Cuaron did with Prisoner of Azkaban, he totally failed at giving it all the emotional intensity there was in the book. Maybe this is mostly the fault of the lead actors' performances. But the pacing of that movie, especially in the scene in the Shrieking Shack, just did not allow for the kind of reactions of shock or sadness you should have been able to have most of the time. The scenes that were supposed to be sentimental and moving just seemed a little cheesy and over-the-top, almost even campy, like the emotional core of the movie didn't really believe in itself.
But I found this absolutely not to be the case in Order of the Phoenix. J.K. Rowling has always been able to to write about all the ideas of love being a great power Harry has that Voldemort doesn't in such a way that it isn't too corny, and I thought that this film managed to portray all those themes in the same way. I actually got a little teary in the scene when Voldemort was possessing Harry and he was having all those flashbacks of his loved ones. As much as it was a little weird that Harry actually had to acknowledge out loud in some way that it was these kind of emotions that made Voldemort unable to stand inhabiting his body for too long, it was probably the only they could do it so it didn't bother me.
There were a lot of strange transitions in the editing and cinematography style, which I think really evoked an appropriately strange and surreal feeling. At the end of the movie, Harry is going to make a great mistake of confusing dreams with reality that will cost Sirius his life. Throughout much of the movie, we see the world through Harry's eyes and often feel almost like we aren't sure what's real or not; Voldemort looks to be actually standing out in public at the train station, and reality blurs right into each next dream scene before we can really get a feeling of what's going on now.
I could not be happier that Yates is going to be doing Half-Blood Prince. If he's going to have Nicholas Hooper do the score again, however, that'll be another story...
Professor Dolores Umbitch - Even if Imelda Staunton does not look much like most people's mental image of Umbridge in this movie, she was somehow completely perfect anyway. I think Umbridge of one of the best-written bad guys in all of the HP universe. People like her exist in the real world and she just makes your skin crawl. I never imagined this character could actually be as loathsome in the film as in the book, but she really was that horrible.
Grimmauld Place and Other Settings - I really loved how Number 12 Grimmauld Place looked. For some reason, I've always imagined that place to have very few windows and therefore very dark, and for all of the scenes in there to be kind of morosely quiet. The mood of all of the scenes there was exactly the same.
The Ministry of Magic was very cool, and really close to how the book described it. I love that little details like the paper plane memos and the voice on the elevator announcing the different departments were included. I just wish the whole Department of Mysteries had looked less shiny and just...older. I've always imagined it to look kind of like parts of the Department of Mysteries has been there underground even before the Ministry was built there.
Sirius and James I mean Harry - After they hardly even included Sirius in the GoF movie, I was really concerned that they just wouldn't be able to make it a big deal and the audience care by the time Sirius dies. But him and Harry's relationship was developed enough in this one that I was actually terribly sad when he died, when I really never cared a bit about Gary Oldman's Sirius before this movie. He was just so loveable and it seemed so goddamn unfair for Harry to lose him. And the part shortly before Bella killed him that he accidentally said, "Nice one, James" to him was :'( Godddd. Sirius is such a tragic character I just can't think about what he's been through too hard...It's just too much. :(((
And even if the veil itself and the way he got killed were awful and just WRONG, the way the movie handled his death was very good. Some of the folks of Mugglecast were discussing the clips of the score and one of them said it was weird to imagine having music to the scene with Sirius dying because he's always imagined it being just silent for a moment afterwards, and I knew what he meant. The scene in the movie actually had a very similar feeling. The way it just kind of stopped everything and went to just a little music and slow motion was, I think, the perfect thing to do.
Random stuff
- Even if Tonks was hardly present, I loved her every second she was on screen. I just wish they'd changed her hair more.
- "You got to admit, Dumbledore has got style." LMAO. Oh Kingsley, you are the shit!
- SIRIUS PUNCHED LUCIUS IN THE FACE. God, that was so unexpected that it was awesome!
- The twins. Oh, God. The twins rock my world. They own my heart and soul. I want to marry them both.
- I have always thought of OotP as the kind of "punk rock" book of the whole series, since it's the most political and all about rebellion, so I thought it was kind of fitting and just plain badass that in this one there was rock music playing in the common room a lot.
- Luna Lovegood was perfect. Perfect. So cute.
- The montages were bloody freaking brilliant. Such a clever way to pack in so much information that doesn't feel rushed. I now wonder how any previous directors didn't even think of it before. And I was so happy they had Snape's annoyed "Obviously" line in there. That's one of my favorite funny parts of the book.
- THE KISS was actually pretty cute. Since Cho isn't so unlikeable in the movie I guess it's okay to kind of like it, right? :) I thought it was really sweet how he was just like "I have no idea" and went in. HAHAHA.
- Ginny kicking ass with the Reducto spell and having Fred and George look at her like "DAMN GIRL WTF" = humongous lolz. I don't enjoy Ginny's nearly one-dimentional perfection any more than a typical Ginny hater, but I still like how they're being totally true to her canon self with her suddenly being a pretty impressive witch (and Harry totally not noticing yet...haha).
- I definitely have the most massive crush on Dean Thomas. It's official. But it's weird to imagine him dating Ginny in the next one. Egh...
- Yay, Ron's not a dumb little twerp just there for our laughs at his expense anymore!
- The Occlumency rocked. I loved how Snape sometimes appeared in Harry's memories and mocked them.
- Ron freaking out when Grawp grabbed Hermione was adorable. Those two are going to be such a cute couple when they just get together already. Haha.
Overall...
I think this one is in an entirely different category of good as the other movies. Order of the Phoenix is my favorite of all of the books despite its perhaps unneeded long-ass length and exhausting excess of exposition, but I decided to not go into this movie with too high expectations. But I definitely don't think the level of my expectations are the reason I liked it so much at all.
OK, now it's time to freak out about Deathly Hallows......*flail*
The Bad
Snape's Worst Very Brief Random Memory - You know, I could talk a whole lot about how much it sucks that we didn't get any explanation of the memory, that it lasted so shortly I don't really remember what all we saw except a little bit of James and lots of broody emo Snape, and that after everybody freaking out about the casting of characters like Lily and Sirius as teenagers we did not see them at all. But it's actually kind of amazing how at that point I didn't much care. Unlike with PoA and GoF, I had been yet to see a scene where I thought, They had to have THAT shit in here but couldn't include ____ from the book, so I could see how interfering it might have been in a movie that already seemed to drag a little. That I wasn't too disappointed once that scene was suddenly over, when that was one of the greatest parts of the book, tells how much I was enjoying the movie. That couldn't even ruin it.
Did she say Avada Kedevra?! - Okay, people. I'm going a little off the topic of just the movie a minute to get up on my soap box to bitchily and opinionatedly state something here because I'm sick of seeing people express their total misunderstanding of this part of the book. LET'S GET SOMETHING STRAIGHT ONCE AND FOR ALL. THEN IT WILL BE THE END OF THIS DISCUSSION FOREVER (unfortunately I'm sure not really...).
- FACT: When you are hit with the Killing Curse, you don't have the chance to stand there looking surprised and realizing what happened to you before you finally fall dead. You're killed immediately and just plop to the ground in a second. As it is written in the book, Sirius clearly does not die immediately after Bella's curse hits him.
CONCLUSION: Whatever curse she used on him, it was not Avada Kedavra.
- FACT: There are other curses you can use on someone in a fight that can kill them besides Adava Kedavra. Just look what Harry did to Draco in the bathroom scene in HBP. And remember how Harry was about to kill Sirius in PoA, knowing exactly what spell he could use to do it, when this was before he even knew about the Unforgivable Curses? Avada Kedavra simply has the distinction of being a curse that instantly kills someone and cannot be blocked, and would not necessarily have to be aimed right at somebody's chest or anything.
CONCLUSION: Bellatrix's curse that she used on Sirius, which did hit him "squarely in the chest," could have been (and I think definitely was) what killed him.
- FACTS: The room in the Department of Mysteries with the veil is called the Death Chamber, implying that this room may have once been used for executions. Remus stops Harry from running through the veil after Sirius, so it is probably something dangerous which you cannot return from.
CONCLUSION: Although Sirius was almost certainly already dead or dying before he fell through the veil (judging, if from nothing else, the look on his face before he falls backwards), the veil is some kind of representation of death as well as maybe a passageway to the world of the dead, and falling through it on accident would probably have killed him even if he hadn't just been hurt with a curse. I think the veil is there in his death scene just to make it that much more dramatic, and also give the first major death in the series an extra feeling of (slightly frustrating) mystery with the absence of a body as well as add a strong implication that Sirius has kept on living in some kind of afterlife (Luna's comment about the voices heard behind the veil as well as the simple image of him just passing through to another place, I think, achieve this).
SECOND CONCLUSION: Sirius's death is not lame. JKR is not lame like that. He was not stupidly killed off by accidentally falling through some fucking curtain. There's kinda more to it than that.
- FACT: In the movie, Bellatrix kills Sirius with the Killing Curse.
CONCLUSION: This one part in the movie was a huge fuck-up that is now only going to perpetuate the completely WRONG point of view of so many fans, and it kind of ruins the mysteriousness of how he dies and makes the veil pointless. Arrrrgh!!
Random Little Things
- The Department of Mysteries was pretty cool, but did not have that total batshit chaos that those chapters in the book had. I wish they could have also shown the room with all the clocks and hourglasses and Ron getting attacked by the weird brain, and all that totally weird stuff. I loved how all of that stuff came up in the book and was kept sort of unexplained.
- No more Remus than that?? :( No more Tonks than that? No more general Order of the Phoenix coolness than that?
- The veil...um...was not even a veil. Come on. It should have been the coolest-looking, most ancient-looking piece of fabric you've ever seen, moving a little sort of like it's alive and being all creepy. This looked like some kind of liquidy time portal out of a science fiction movie. WTF.
- Bellatrix kind of bothered me. I like Helena Bonham Carter but never thought she was a very good choice for Bella. She was acting like herself in several other movies instead of very much like the character. I hated how she actually acted all scared after Harry knocked her down. What the hell was up with that? One of the only moments of her acting I liked was when she crazily shouted at Harry for saying Lord V's name. But as a whole her performance just seemed kinda...uneven and indecisive.
- When I heard some of the score online, I thought it sounded really good, but I just thought it didn't work so well in the movie. It never really seemed to enhance the feeling of what was happening when it was playing, and there also were too many times it felt like music was needed and it was just so quiet.
The Good
Haaaarry - Before seeing this, I had skimmed through a scathing review saying that Daniel Radcliffe's inability to perform the right level of emotion in this movie basically ruined it. Now I can't believe somebody would think that. Dan is definitely better in this one than all the others. And I was actually sort of creeped out in the scene when he was being possessed by Voldemort. Damn.
David Yates - I was completely blown away by the directing of this one. Yates just seemed to allow the film to move through this universe with so much ease. There were all these little details, like opening a scene with a bird's-eye-view of Dumbledore's office and a close-up of Fawkes sitting above it, or actually giving us the information that it is an unusually hot summer in a way that doesn't dwell on it like it's terribly important, that somehow added a sense of realism to the movie and a casual familiarity with the setting and story despite this being the director's first Potter flick. (We even saw Aberforth Dumbledore and the freaking goat, when only a totally hardcore fan would get the joke behind that!) He puts all of the magical stuff in the background so that it can be more of a movie about people and relationships. This is the first Harry Potter movie that I've ever seen and then been able to think to myself that it was a beautiful film, because Yates succeeded in actually making it emotionally effective as well as just entertaining and funny.
As great a job as Alfonso Cuaron did with Prisoner of Azkaban, he totally failed at giving it all the emotional intensity there was in the book. Maybe this is mostly the fault of the lead actors' performances. But the pacing of that movie, especially in the scene in the Shrieking Shack, just did not allow for the kind of reactions of shock or sadness you should have been able to have most of the time. The scenes that were supposed to be sentimental and moving just seemed a little cheesy and over-the-top, almost even campy, like the emotional core of the movie didn't really believe in itself.
But I found this absolutely not to be the case in Order of the Phoenix. J.K. Rowling has always been able to to write about all the ideas of love being a great power Harry has that Voldemort doesn't in such a way that it isn't too corny, and I thought that this film managed to portray all those themes in the same way. I actually got a little teary in the scene when Voldemort was possessing Harry and he was having all those flashbacks of his loved ones. As much as it was a little weird that Harry actually had to acknowledge out loud in some way that it was these kind of emotions that made Voldemort unable to stand inhabiting his body for too long, it was probably the only they could do it so it didn't bother me.
There were a lot of strange transitions in the editing and cinematography style, which I think really evoked an appropriately strange and surreal feeling. At the end of the movie, Harry is going to make a great mistake of confusing dreams with reality that will cost Sirius his life. Throughout much of the movie, we see the world through Harry's eyes and often feel almost like we aren't sure what's real or not; Voldemort looks to be actually standing out in public at the train station, and reality blurs right into each next dream scene before we can really get a feeling of what's going on now.
I could not be happier that Yates is going to be doing Half-Blood Prince. If he's going to have Nicholas Hooper do the score again, however, that'll be another story...
Professor Dolores Umbitch - Even if Imelda Staunton does not look much like most people's mental image of Umbridge in this movie, she was somehow completely perfect anyway. I think Umbridge of one of the best-written bad guys in all of the HP universe. People like her exist in the real world and she just makes your skin crawl. I never imagined this character could actually be as loathsome in the film as in the book, but she really was that horrible.
Grimmauld Place and Other Settings - I really loved how Number 12 Grimmauld Place looked. For some reason, I've always imagined that place to have very few windows and therefore very dark, and for all of the scenes in there to be kind of morosely quiet. The mood of all of the scenes there was exactly the same.
The Ministry of Magic was very cool, and really close to how the book described it. I love that little details like the paper plane memos and the voice on the elevator announcing the different departments were included. I just wish the whole Department of Mysteries had looked less shiny and just...older. I've always imagined it to look kind of like parts of the Department of Mysteries has been there underground even before the Ministry was built there.
Sirius and James I mean Harry - After they hardly even included Sirius in the GoF movie, I was really concerned that they just wouldn't be able to make it a big deal and the audience care by the time Sirius dies. But him and Harry's relationship was developed enough in this one that I was actually terribly sad when he died, when I really never cared a bit about Gary Oldman's Sirius before this movie. He was just so loveable and it seemed so goddamn unfair for Harry to lose him. And the part shortly before Bella killed him that he accidentally said, "Nice one, James" to him was :'( Godddd. Sirius is such a tragic character I just can't think about what he's been through too hard...It's just too much. :(((
And even if the veil itself and the way he got killed were awful and just WRONG, the way the movie handled his death was very good. Some of the folks of Mugglecast were discussing the clips of the score and one of them said it was weird to imagine having music to the scene with Sirius dying because he's always imagined it being just silent for a moment afterwards, and I knew what he meant. The scene in the movie actually had a very similar feeling. The way it just kind of stopped everything and went to just a little music and slow motion was, I think, the perfect thing to do.
Random stuff
- Even if Tonks was hardly present, I loved her every second she was on screen. I just wish they'd changed her hair more.
- "You got to admit, Dumbledore has got style." LMAO. Oh Kingsley, you are the shit!
- SIRIUS PUNCHED LUCIUS IN THE FACE. God, that was so unexpected that it was awesome!
- The twins. Oh, God. The twins rock my world. They own my heart and soul. I want to marry them both.
- I have always thought of OotP as the kind of "punk rock" book of the whole series, since it's the most political and all about rebellion, so I thought it was kind of fitting and just plain badass that in this one there was rock music playing in the common room a lot.
- Luna Lovegood was perfect. Perfect. So cute.
- The montages were bloody freaking brilliant. Such a clever way to pack in so much information that doesn't feel rushed. I now wonder how any previous directors didn't even think of it before. And I was so happy they had Snape's annoyed "Obviously" line in there. That's one of my favorite funny parts of the book.
- THE KISS was actually pretty cute. Since Cho isn't so unlikeable in the movie I guess it's okay to kind of like it, right? :) I thought it was really sweet how he was just like "I have no idea" and went in. HAHAHA.
- Ginny kicking ass with the Reducto spell and having Fred and George look at her like "DAMN GIRL WTF" = humongous lolz. I don't enjoy Ginny's nearly one-dimentional perfection any more than a typical Ginny hater, but I still like how they're being totally true to her canon self with her suddenly being a pretty impressive witch (and Harry totally not noticing yet...haha).
- I definitely have the most massive crush on Dean Thomas. It's official. But it's weird to imagine him dating Ginny in the next one. Egh...
- Yay, Ron's not a dumb little twerp just there for our laughs at his expense anymore!
- The Occlumency rocked. I loved how Snape sometimes appeared in Harry's memories and mocked them.
- Ron freaking out when Grawp grabbed Hermione was adorable. Those two are going to be such a cute couple when they just get together already. Haha.
Overall...
I think this one is in an entirely different category of good as the other movies. Order of the Phoenix is my favorite of all of the books despite its perhaps unneeded long-ass length and exhausting excess of exposition, but I decided to not go into this movie with too high expectations. But I definitely don't think the level of my expectations are the reason I liked it so much at all.
OK, now it's time to freak out about Deathly Hallows......*flail*