 | Studios: | Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. |
| Release: | July 11, 2007 | |
| Genre: | Action/Adventure, Kids/Family, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Adaptation and Sequel | |
| MPAA Rating: | PG-13 for sequences of fantasy violence and frightening images. |
All Harry Potter movies look pretty. However, as Rowling's books kept getting thicker and the movies should not be more than 2.5 hours if they want to keep the attention of the audience, we find less and less of the books in the movies as we go along the series. Once more, we find characters taking over the function of minor characters to keep the time and cost short: It is Neville who discovers the Room of Requirement, it is Filch who spies on the secret meetings, and it is Cho who betrays Dumbledore's Army. I find it funny that the movie even bothered to show the inquisitorial squad when it was Filch who got air time doing the spying.
Nothing drives this movie internally. It is the events in the book that dictate what scenes come next ... and after watching this movie, I rather think that in good movies, the scenes themselves should move the movie forward to what will happen next. I find it rather crazy that to explain what happens in between scenes, the movie uses too much of the Daily Prophet. If there is an extended DVD version that amends this editing job, I would like to see that movie.
The dynamics between the characters have been maintained, and the adolescent child actors have grown into their roles. Rupert Grint's Ron Weasley is more of a wuss in the movie than in the books, and still resorts to funny facial expressions (those faces are getting to be tiring - and annoying since Ron Weasley in my favorite character in the books), and we see that the focus on female characters is shifting from Hermione Granger to Ginny Weasley.
Cho Chang is not forgotten. There are those eye-to-eye contact moments and the requisite kissing scene between Harry and Cho. The latter should have come across as a tender, awkward moment but struck me as plain awkward. The scenes between Harry and Luna Lovegood actually had more heart. The "Ron Weasley is our King" angle was totally taken out of this movie. The quidditch chapters would probably be enough to make another movie.
Quidditch wasn't needed to put action in this movie. The battle at the Ministry of Magic was great. We finally see more of the other actors in the movie apart from the kids and Dolores Umbridge.
Since Dolores Umbridge is the new character here, Imelda Staunton gets more screen time while the other actors are underutilized. We see little of Helena Bonham Carter's Bellatrix Lestrange except in the Ministry of Magic. There is a very short scene that shows her being freed from Azkaban, but it was so short, it took a while before I realized what it was about. Sirius Black does get a few but good scenes, after all, this is the last we shall see of him in the series. I think I would enjoy seeing more of Emma Thompson's portrayal of Sybil Trelawney's breakdown. Dame Maggie Smith appears as Prof. McGonagall in only 2 or 3 scenes. Anyway, as Harry Potter movies are part of British pop culture, I don't think those actors mind having little screen time. I think they're just glad their characters are still included in the movie version.
The movie is not lacking in talent, or computer graphics, and it does have good moments of action, comedy and drama. It suffers from the editing needed to trim the story to just above two hours of screen time. The abrupt change from one scene to another dissolves any momentum a scene might have built up, leaving little to tug at the viewers emotionally. The film had little time to delve into the numerous personalities populating it, that the movie comes across as merely a visual companion to the book, when it should be able to stand on its own.
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