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by Elliotte Rusty Harold.
Original Post: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
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Some books just don’t fit into two hour movies. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix may well be one of them. Beth and I went to see it yesterday, and all the relevant plot points were there, but it had to skim over them so quickly that there really was very little heart to the movie. The characters just jumped from scene to scene.
The first two Harry Potter movies were good, mostly because they faithfully translated much shorter books onto the screen. The fourth movie was good mostly because it didn’t. By radically chopping or even eliminating various subplots, it actually produced a much tighter, more coherent story than Rowling provided in the fourth book.
The third movie, I’m not sure what happened. Despite having a reasonably sized book to adapt, it just didn’t live up to the first two movies. There was no real sense of time passing through the school year. In fact, the whole plot just sort of died. The only bit I can remember from the movie (and not the book) is Buckbeak, and not much of that. Perhaps just a bad script or directing?
The fifth movie, though, it’s obvious what happened. There was simply too much material in the 870 page novel to squeeze into a two hour movie. Unlike The Goblet of Fire, there were no extraneous sideplots that could be trimmed or cut to save time. Consequently we got a couple of minutes of Harry’s private lessons with Snape, a couple of minutes of Bellatrix LeStrange, a couple of minutes in the order’s headquarters, a couple of minutes with Hagrid’s brother, and so on. All were vastly too compressed to do justice to the scenes.
It didn’t help either that all the primary characters have vastly overshot their characters’ presumed ages. Daniel Radcliffe is at the stage in his career where he should be doing teen soaps for the CW, not playing 15 year-olds getting their first kiss. Matthew Lewis (Neville Longbottom) has grown so much he could be playing the tough cop role on British police procedurals. That part really needed to be recast. The adult actors were wonderful as always, though. Helena Bonham Carter was brilliant as Bellatrix LeStrange. Evanna Lynch was also excellent as Luna Lovegood, but she had the advantage of being about the only child actor who got to play her own age. Given that everyone knew the kids were going to outgrow their roles, I am surprised that they didn’t shoot the movies faster. By the time the Deathly Hallows movie is released, they could be halting filming every fifteen minutes to remove Harry’s five-o’clock shadow, strapping in Ron’s belly, and shooting Hermione from weird angles to keep her from showing.
Ages aside, the bottom line is that it’s just not possible to compress 870 pages of a good book into two hours without cutting out a lot; and a director probably shouldn’t try. Maybe they can do a little better with next years Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (only 672 pages) or the even larger and later Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (784 pages); but I doubt it. Some books just shouldn’t be made into movies, and Harry Potter may well be one of them.
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