Harry Potter Movie 5

[timepiececlock]

Woot! That was a fun movie-going experience. This is only the third movie I've actually seen in theaters, and so far my favorite HP theater experience. It was the most *fun* to watch, the most tense and exciting, though I have to say I still think the third film, Azkaban, was the best-made. This episode was not without its flaws, but I think it's been by far the most fun to watch.

Why? Because it was a movie. It wasn't a book on screen. It was a movie in its own right-- the most starkly different film of the series yet, in multiple ways and levels: tone, theme, mood, imagery, maturity, violence, and ambition. This one cut huge swaths out of the book, paring it down until it wasn't a story about the student year at Hogwarts, or Harry's friendships, or the wizarding world. This was a movie about Harry. Just Harry.

A disproportionate number of scenes were done in close-up; this is noticeable right away and just as immediate in its effect. We stay with Harry's perspective through the whole film, very often right in his head, seeing through his eyes or as if we rode on his shoulder. This makes for a tightly wound visual thematic device that, while it leaves room for little else in plot, nevertheless makes the exciting parts that much tenser and stronger.

And, as in the fifth book, Harry is an Angry Young Man, oh yes he is. What I liked about the movie, that I didn't get from the book, was that in the film, all Harry's anger is seen as a direct result of the previous events, a combination of years of stress with a kind of post-traumatic stress from both Cedric's death and the Dementor attack that opens the fifth film. All through the movie Harry is never given the chance to talk to the people he needs to talk to, and all the fear and anger just builds and builds. From what I remember of the book, a lot of his anger was an extension of Voldemort's remote mental influence. In the movie, all Harry's anger comes from the just plain shitty happenings of his recent life. It feels a simpler, more logical explanation and a smoother transition in the movie than I remember from reading all those caps-locked sentences in the book.

There's a lot to dislike, here, if you're a hardcore HP fan. I won't kid: things get cut, things get added, things go differently even if the end result is the same. I'm a fan of the idea of the books more than the books themselves (oh JKR, if only your prose could catch up to your imagination, what an epic this would be), so I'm fine if they chop it to hell as long as the spirit of the story carries through. And that's what you've got here: a wildly different take on HP, where the writer and director stopped trying to make the book into the movie and just made a movie to stand on its own. And even though this story is a placeholder for future battles, a mere tease, as a movie it rocks.

I think one of the aspects I liked was that this movie stripped away all the glamour of the wizarding world. A few little tricks here and there, but even the fantastical was something easily used in the context of war: an ear to spy, a firework to explode, a message to burn. The plain fact is this school creates wizards and witches, not carpenters and tailors. These kids are being trained and even bred to do dangerous things, and this movie takes the kids from the protection of the school and its illusion of safety, a safety that it seems never truly existed except in the innocent minds of the students themselves.

It's not all fun and games. It's not all pretty lights and party tricks. It's power. It's war.

There were some flaws in the film-- little ones and a couple big ones (namely the pacing in the very end)-- but all you need to know is that this is a cool movie and you should see it in theaters. Luna was perfect, Sirius was good, the thestrals were neat, Harry's hair wasn't stupid anymore, and some of the wizard fighting was downright awesome.

I wish we'd seen more of the Weasleys' grand exit. I want the hallway swamp, the entire student body under siege of mayhem.

The arrivals of the Death Eaters and the Order members was just freaking cool. The swooping swirling tendrils as the Order members apparated in with swirling white flashes and tendrils of magic, the way the Death Eaters fwooped up and away with the same swirl, this time of dark blackness instead of light and power.

When the shelves holding the precious prophecy spheres started to fall over, all I could think was, "Those were some horribly made shelves! Whoever made those shelves so they'd just fall over like that did a seriously crap-ass job." This is what Habitat For Humanity and NCCC has done to me.

I liked the opening scene much better in this movie than in the others. Right off the bat, it feels different. No time wasted on introductions: here is the kid with the dead parents, the kid who can't sleep anymore because of terrors, the kid who is being mocked for his pain, and here, ladies and gentlemen, are the creatures sent to murder him.

Comments

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

The 6th book was kind of crazy in comparison to the rest-- if you're going to start, I'd say start with the 5th and then go forward, at this point. All the really important, relevant stuff starts with the 5th book, and many things in the 6th depend more heavily on the 5th book than previous books depended on each other.