There are lots of articles out there right now comparing HBP to ESB, but I haven’t noticed any pointing out the most obvious comparison: the final shots of each movie are damn near identical. Right down to the Millenium Falcon flying away being replaced by Fawkes the phoenix.
The bit that’s always pissed me off is that they still haven’t revealed who Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs actually are. I think Lupin and Sirius might have used the nicknames to refer to each other a few times on film, but for the most part as far as the movies are concerned, they’re just a bunch of Fred & George-type entrepreneurs from back in the day.
At least that’s faithful to the books. Rowland makes him seem like this huge, destructive force, basically the Gregor Clegane of the Potterverse, and then for all intents and purposes, he’s just another Death Eater. While reading the books I had assumed he was in there as a kind of arch-nemesis to Lupin, leading up to a kick-ass werewolf throwdown in the last book.
Just finished watching it. The beginning of the movie was a bunch of random cuts that are pretty confusing. Luckily I have read the book and remember quite a bit, but it was too jumpy and unfocused.
Middle part of the movie was good except for the romance stuff, which was too often and too uncomfortable.
End of the movie was alright except for some of the changes made. It just doesn’t make sense to me that they all walk up to his tower and then suddenly they are walking out of the school as if no one confronts them the entire time :/
Overall it was entertaining, but only because it is a Harry Potter movie. Throw any other name on this movie and it would be a bad movie.
Yeah. Why is Harry’s patronus a stag? Who made the marauder’s map? These feel like pretty key details to me, but apparently not to the writers of the script.
Of course, as we’ve seen, whenever they leave stuff like this out that actually is kind of important, it ends up having to be shoehorned into later movies.
And it’s not like any of this stuff would have taken any time. I was pretty happy with the 4th movie, as for the most part they didn’t cut any really important bits (and in fact I considered the loss of the SPEW subplot to be a goddam boon) but then at the end when they didn’t bother to have Cornelius Fudge refusing to believe that Voldemort was back completely blew their setup for the 5th movie. And that’s a scene that would have taken a grand total of 30 friggin’ seconds.
Oh, and the 3rd movie has the absolute worst ending scene. Really, a freeze frame of Harry on his broom? It felt like a 70s sitcom end. “WE’RE GONNA MAKE IT AFTER ALLLL!!!”
I do think the problems with three were a result of Cuaron adding so much of his own stylistic “business”. It starts with the very opening where Harry is casting lumos in his bedroom, breaking the very same law that will shortly become a big plot point. You also have gags like the shrunken heads and the toad choir and the singing lady in the painting that just have no basis in the source material. There are great things about it, too, like the casting of Lupin and Sirius, and the fact that the child actors are starting to come in to their own. And it benefits by not being as lifeless as the Columbus directed installments.
As bahimiron said, it leaves way too much on the cutting room floor. Specifically, removing all the backstory about the Marauders and then just launching into the endgame with them really robs the entire story of its punch for me. I also didn’t like a lot of the extraneous stuff Cuaron threw in. I’d rather have the actual story brought to the screen than a choir of children singing Macbeth lines for no discernable reason.
It also really threw into stark relief how dumb the time travel solution to that book was. It didn’t really bug me when I read it originally, but in the movie it was just so damn lame. I haven’t re-read the third book again since then, so I’m not sure if there was some difference to the book’s version that made it work better.
3 was on TV last night, and I don’t remember it being spectacularly terrible; though, as a qualifier, I haven’t read the book in years, and looking at it on my bookshelf next to the other books, its impressively small, especially compared to Goblet of Fire.
As I said, it’s a better-made film than the first two, without question, but it leaves so much out that it doesn’t come close to doing the book justice. At the time of release it was my favorite of the books. Now I’m not sure it would be, but frankly the last book kind of dampened my Harry Potter fandom to a critical degree.
If my choice for a movie is between Azkaban, which told a cohesive, exciting, coherent story and Half-Blood Prince where they seemed to cram so much in that they couldn’t give any actual time to develop any of it, I’ll take Azkaban every time.
So stupid. They’ve been drinking butterbeer since the first book. It, like rootbeer or ginger ale seems, rather clearly, to be non-alcoholic. Hell, I think in book 5 there’s even a part where Ron tries to order some of the “good stuff” at the Hogs Head, but is rebuffed. Hagrid is shown doing some drinking at various times, but the scene where Ron gets poisoned is the only time I can think of where anyone under (wizarding) age is described as drinking anything with alcohol.
Anyone out there that hasn’t read the books and just watches the movies? I’m curious if the weakening of those scenes was felt by someone who hasn’t read the books
This is from a few pages back, but it hasn’t been specifically addressed…I had no expectation, other than knowing that Dumbledore died, 'cause I’ve never read any of the books. I felt like the movie was very adequate, but not spectacular. But that’s pretty much what I’ve felt about all of the movie. “Pretty good,” but certainly not great. I’m not the harshest critic ever, but I didn’t really notice the loss of the fight. The death of Dumbledore was the climax, and while reading some of the comments in here make me see what you guys mean, and I agree it would’ve been better if done that way, when watching the movie, it didn’t seem TOO off, at least not in a way that I could’ve put my finger on it.
But the Half-Blood Prince reveal…yeah, THAT I could definitely tell needed some work.
Rywill posted my thoughts almost perfectly on the overall movie.
I always assumed butterbeer was “imitation” alcohol, something that simulates the effects of a very weak alcohol without any of the ill effects. Basically, magic root beer. Also useful for staving off ghost pirates.
Hermione was only tipsy because she’s a lightweight.
The wife and I watched the movie last night. I didn’t think the movie was very good, but I think that’s partly because it shows up how weak the source material is.
The HBP reveal, as others have said, was pretty trivial, but I always thought it was kind of trivial in the book as well. (Through most of the book I’d been expecting that it was Tom Riddle’s book or something like that).
The romance feels very non-motivated. Ginny’s dating Dean Thomas, then all of a sudden she’s kissing Harry in the room of requirement – they never even mention that she broke up with Dean. But, again, it felt kind of goofy in the book too.
The big problem, I think, is that it feels like a stop along the way, but not a story in itself. There are two important things in the movie – the Draco plot (I include Dumbledore’s death in that) and the horcruxes. Together, their screen time is maybe 30 minutes. So they should’ve done two things:
Focus on the important stuff – a bigger climactic battle, more time chasing down the Slughorn memory, more time on Draco.
Cut everything else – the McClaggan story goes nowhere. The Lavender Brown story was ultimately pointless. Etc.
I always assumed that butterbeer was the equivalent of the English version of ginger beer, which actually has some alcohol, but you’d have to drink an awful lot of it before you’d feel the effects. The other age-appropriate drink might be shandy, which is difficult to describe to Americans, but is again a low-alcohol drink.
When I was going to secondary school in England, we would go to the local pub, lie about our ages, and ordered ginger beer or shandy. It was very daring to us at the time. Thinking back on it, I realize that the pub owners must have laughed their backsides off at the kids trying to pretend they were all so grown up.
I was a little annoyed that they cast Lavender Brown to be this ludicrous character who ended up looking something like the ugly best friend of the evil cheerleader in an ABC Family original movie about a teenage girl trying to fit in a new high school. In the books she’s supposed to be very pretty, just dumb and annoying.
Funny, Azkaban and HBP are my favorites to date as well. The end of HBP was incredibly bad in the movie, cutting away from the Snape/Dumbledore encounter at the crucial last minute was a total WTF moment for me. Instead we get slow-motion closeups of Dumbledore falling to the floor and… done. Other than that, the Riddle memories and overall pacing was very good.
