A book is always better than the movie based on it. But if a relatively uncomplicated book has ever been made into such a bad movie, I do not know of it. If the movie were to be described in one word, a good one would be melangé.
GoF is not my favourite book in the HP series. I felt when reading the book that Rowling had lost her way; that she was forking out too much and introducing too many things at the same time. However, this is also the book where we are introduced to the wide world of magic rather than the limited coterie of Harry, friends and family. We come to know of foreign schools, magical tournaments, see the first Death Eaters and at the end Voldemort is reborn. When it came out it was by far the most voluminous of the series. Taking this book and making a decent movie out of it – tackling the myriad and intertwined narratives – is a challenging task; a task that Mike Newell fails to achieve. He fails at the very outset by not identifying a core theme for the movie. The identification of a core theme would have allowed him to identify and cull out the extraneous material with relative ease.
Instead, what happens is that random parts of the narrative are thrown together in the mix without rhyme or reason, much like one of Snape’s potion assignments, hoping something good will come out of it. The movie does not tell a story of its own. It merely puts on the visual medium parts of Rowling’s book. This is my biggest disappointment with the movie.
On other aspects, Michael Gambon as Dumbledore did not exude the same charisma and power as Richard Harris in the earlier movies. Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort had too short a role to make any mark. The main trio however have grown and put on mature performances. The graphics were top of the line as expected from a mega-gazillion venture. These however, remain only sidenotes as the film lacked a basic narrative spine.
The HP series is essentially about human feelings, emotions and conflicts rather than state-of-the-art graphics. The graphics and the sets are the means to an end and not the ends in themselves. I was hoping after three movies Warner Bros. would have understood that, but maybe then I was hoping for too much.
technorati tags: movies
Odd, the fun part for me was the way the plot started to come together in GoF the book – made it far better than its predecessors.
The *magical* world became a lot more exciting when that happened.