BooksForKidsBlog

Friday, July 13, 2007

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (The Movie): Harry Puts Away Childish Things

I saw the new Harry Potter movie today with my granddaughter, who read the book three times, and in a surprisingly cross-generational consensus, we both liked it much more than we expected.

We both agree that we never saw a movie that was as good as the book, so with that said upfront, we found the movie worked as a movie without violating the thrust of the book in a way superior to the previous two Potter movies.

The movie dramatically jumps into the rising threat of Voldemort's return with the attack upon Harry and Dudley Dursley by the dementors and moves swiftly through Harry's introduction to the secret Order of the Phoenix which alone understands the impending threat. Fifteen-year-old Harry finds it impossible to fall back into the youthful high jinks at Hogwarts as he watches the school sink under the control of the Ministry of Magic's minion, deliciously named Dolores Umbridge, whose mission is to stamp out any rumor of the rise of the Death Eaters and the return of Voldemort.

Harry's struggle to stand alone against the threat and his part in the final wizard's duel gives the CGI guys a chance to put on a good show, and they do so in a satisfying but restrained way. I'd give the movie a strong A- for its delicate selectivity and strong performances by a sterling cast. It's almost as good as the first two movies, and given that there's little room for boyish fun and games in this plot, that's saying a lot.

Because of its complexities and the brevity of exposition for characters and secondary plot lines from earlier books, it is almost essential that the viewer have read or at least seen the previous four stories before taking in this movie. Director David Yates uses a sort of insider's shorthand which would leave the moviegoer lost without previous experience with the series.

For me Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was a good but difficult book--long and byzantine in its political intrigue and grimly serious in its ambivalent playing out of the theme of good and evil. The fact that no movie can encompass a really good novel, especially one of 800+ pages, is an advantage for Yates, who obviously realizes the impossibility of trying and wisely cuts to the chase. As Boston Globe critic Ty Burr (author of the previously reviewed The Best Old Movies for Families: A Guide to Watching Together says, "All Potter movies are acts of literary triage," and Yates does an admirably good job of selectivity in what he puts on screen.

The basic theme of good versus evil evident from Rowling's first book is there, of course, but the sub-theme of the mixture of good and evil in all of us, is really the matter of this book, and Yate's direction gives this theme a strong underscoring. As Voldemort gains followers and power, Harry fears that in his persistent nightmares he himself is falling into the dark side, that Voldemort is slowly taking over his mind. Sirius Black counsels Harry that all humans have both good and evil in them, but that the test is ultimately in what they choose to do.

Harry Potter is, of course, also a coming-of-age story in which magic is metaphor for the powers of good earned as the young make their way to maturity. Some (see John Granger's Looking for God in Harry Potter) go so far as to see the novels as almost religious allegory in the same genre as Pilgrim's Progress. All of that moral complexity is hard to put into a summertime blockbuster movie, but Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix deserves an A for effort.

FYI, Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Roger Ebert gives the movie a nuanced thumbs up, saying "it's a well-crafted entry in the "Potter" series." Critic Ty Burr generally agrees, adding, "Playtime is over.... Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is all business, and it casts a spell utterly unlike the first four films."

The film is rated PG-13 in consideration of some potentially frightening fantasy sequences.

Post-Post Note: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix broke box office records for this past weekend. As can be seen from your comments, public opinion is all over the map on the movie, depending on whether the viewer wants a literal film of the entire novel, page by page, or a cohesive film which is a work of art in its own right! Pity the poor screenwriter and director who has to try to please both camps!

But with box-office receipts like they got this past week, that's how they earn the big bucks!

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8 Comments:

  • "The test is ultimately in what they choose to do." Actually that was Sirius Black who said that IIRC.

    RKV

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1:34 PM  

  • "[I]n a way superior to the previous two Potter movies."

    You mean the previous four Potter movies.

    By Blogger Havok, at 1:50 PM  

  • I liked the film too, and it seems so for everybody I know. Only 6 days to go!

    By Blogger valentina, at 3:23 PM  

  • Great review. I wrote a review as well, although rather brief, on my Blog:

    http://nonpartypolitics.blogspot.com/2007/07/i-dont-know-jk-rowlings-politics.html

    I agree with your assessment... having read all the books and seen all the movies, I would say this is the best cinematic representation to date, even though it explains the least in the way of plot, etc.

    By Blogger Paul Allen, at 4:12 PM  

  • I liked it less than I expected. I've also read and seen all the Potter books and movies to date, and this one did the worst job of sweeping in the various plot lines and issues in the book. That is in large part because the fifth book is the longest one yet adapted to screen, but it really should have been done as two movies, filmed together but released six months apart.

    I fear anyone who hasn't read Phoenix will be lost. Too many critical elements (e.g. Kreacher's significance) are merely hinted at, and too many side-plots (such as the Quidditch competition) developed in previous movies are left out.

    Yes, the movie does focus on the core serious issues, but I fear the violence it does to the overall story will lose many followers, especially the more casual ones.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 8:19 PM  

  • I have not read the book (although I guess I have to now) and had absolutely no problem understanding what was going on.

    Umbridge is perhaps the best villain to come along in any genre for a very long time. She's also an extremely subversive one, standing as she does for the forces of order and good, rather than being a mere minion of evil.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 8:43 PM  

  • I disagree completely. The acting (especially from the Dursleys) was in several cases perfectly dreadful, and I have no choice but to blame the director, seeing as how Cuaron, at least, got decent performances from them. There were major editing problems (most clearly apparent in transitions between shots in the first 20 minutes) and pointless changes in how magical processes take place. The motivations of half of the adult participants were completely obscured, to the point that we're really only sure of what the villains wanted. 3/4ths of the remarkable subtlety that Rowling put into the book failed to even make a shadowy appearance, and for the third consecutive film, Dumbledore made me want to root for the bad guys. Apparition was shown to work in two different ways within the very same film, the fact that it was Harry who got Sirius killed was totally overlooked, and crucial revelations and epiphanies (including Harry's necessary "my dad was a jerk when he was 15") were abandoned in favor of an incredibly tedious CGI wizarding battle in which clever spellwork, a nifty chase through intriguing bits of the Dept. of Mysteries, and some serious character development were replaced with fencing-except-with-wands-and-no-contact and lots and lots of whoooshing everywhere. They were reduced to showing "good" people with white light trails after kind-of-Apparating, and "bad" people with black trails, and occasionally throwing in lines so completely out of context that one really wonders if the guy who did the screenplay read the book or just someone else's notes on it.

    As a film, it's third best out of five only because the Columbus ones had such big problems. As an adaptation of the novels, it's tying for worst with the 4th movie. And in comparison to other actionish films released this year, it beats Spiderman, Fantastic 4, and Pirates only because they were perfectly dreadful, and it cannot compare to Transformers (which had its own problems.) I'd say it ties with Live Free or Die Hard, but only because the Die Hard film had some serious plausibility concerns and the Editors Asleep At the Wheel disease was in full force.

    (then again, I made the critical error of beginning my re-reading of the books before seeing the film; the books remind me how much I love JK Rowling, and how frustrating I find the films. This in no way changes the dreadful editing and pointless and counterproductive changes to the mechanics of the books shown in this and the other films, however.)

    By Blogger Sarah, at 11:27 PM  

  • Thanks for all your comments, pro, con, and (Anonymous RKV) corrective. I appreciate your opinions, all!

    By Blogger GTC, at 10:12 AM  

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