Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Movie Review

I'll be brief because it's likely that nothing I say is actually going to stop you seeing this movie. It starts off magnificently, and at first I was really hooked in. The intial scenes and then the Quidditch Tournament really sweeps you away (as I'm sure is intended).

This is a very long film, and about half way through the story starts to loose its pace. Boredom set in for me somewhere during the lead up to the ball. Things pick up a bit later, but it never really gets back on track properly. At the end which really ought to have been gripping and emotionally moving it fails to maintain interest, and the pacing is awkward. I recall that the book recovered well at the end after a flabby middle third, but the film doesn't manage so well.

Nevertheless, Goblet of Fire is loaded with eye-candy and at times is both impressive and exciting. If you haven't read the books it serves to keeps you up with the story. It's a rather long experience, so be prepared and don't drink a dozen cups of coffee right before going in; it's hard enough to concentrate at the end as it is.

If you've already read the book you will spend a lot of time spotting what's missing from this film. The book was fairly long for a Harry Potter story, and had far too much going on to make a prefect movie, so it doesn't surprise me that there were problems deciding what to keep and what to dump. The problem is that some of what they decided they had to keep does not play so well in the film as it did in the book. I think perhaps they needed to take a bit more license with the material and change the details of things a little more here and there to better preserve the spirit of the book. There were also times when the whole tournament theme started to become overdone.

By sticking to the simplistic sequencing of the book the movie runs into pace problems that prevent it from being the triumph it might have been. It's a pity because it starts so well. Some have said that they might have chosen other scenes from the book, but to my mind the problems are not so much with the scenes chosen as how they are presented.

The ball, in particular, does not seem of interest to the key characters, and little of great importance appears to takes place. There were no problems with the ball in the book, and so we have to wonder whether it was properly handled. In the end they couldn't seem to decide whether to play it straight or for laughs. If they had mixed some of the other missing material from the book into the ball it might have been made more interesting. In the end the ball relies on too many characters that simply aren't developed enough to work in the movie.

I really can't imagine how they are going to get through Order of the Phoenix without problems the same or worse than this movie, as Goblet of Fire is a long book, but short in comparison to its successor. Order of the Phoenix has far too much in it to make just one film and it seems like they will really have a real struggle on their hands with that one. I can imagine that almost the entirety of the character development will be cut as a result.

posted by Peter Wake @ 2:03 am