I am a Harry Potter fan. My parents read the Harry Potter books to and with me and I was one of the mega geeks standing in line, with bated breath, every time, for the newest installment in the series.
When the movies came out I was 10 years old and very eager to see them....once again being the person waiting for the midnight showings. As a child I really enjoyed the first two....two or three....movies. The fourth movie was painful to watch. I was angry in the theater and the MOMENT the movie ended I went on my rant.
Forget about the fact that all of the important events in the book were left out of the movie, making it nothing more than a movie about a magical triathlon, but it did not even succeed in that endeavor! The Maze. All I could think about for days was that stupid maze! It should have been the most exciting bit in the movie....it could have given me a feeling other than horror at the creation of such a film. But no. Instead of giving me some source of entertainment the scene merely made me despise the movie completely- it added to my suffering, it crushed the Harry Potter movie lover in me.
The maze in the book has tests of the contestants' minds and magical talents. The maze in the movie it....ate people? ARE...YOU...SERIOUS! Vines come out of the ground and suck people in and attempt to grab the contestants as they run to the Cup. Very impressive way for them to depict what tripping in the magical world looks like but I'm rather accustomed to stumbling over shrubs in the 'real world' and don't have the burning need to pay to see a CGI version of it.
Apart from the fact that I am/was an avid Harry Potter book fan, and thus had to be disappointed in the movie for it's faithfulness to the book and the failure to feed my need for a well formed scene, the movie had no flow, no plot. Instead of retelling the story the film gave an overview of what happened. It felt like the director and screen writers had that high school (and college) 'oh shit' moment where they had been procrastinating and through the movie together at the last moment yelling back and forth things like; "Quick! We forgot about that one kid that was supposed be doing that thing!", "Okay, now that guy dies....don't worry about it they'll figure it out!". While watching the movie I could hear a voice in my head summarizing the book;
There's a big tournament all the characters go to and when it ends death eaters show up and everyone starts running around screaming and then a guy shoots a symbol up into the air and these ministry-type guys appear and are very angry and accusatory and there's more yelling followed by people returning home and more panicking. The students finally get to school and discover that theirs a big tournament going on throughout the school year that is very dangerous and has resulted in deaths in the past. Harry gets chosen and Ron gets angry at him and they don't talk. The first event takes place, Harry and Ron make up, there's a ball, another event and then the last event which takes Harry and another kid to a cemetery where the dreaded Voldemort is waiting to use Harry in a ritual which will restore him to his former glory. The other kid dies and Harry and Voldemort fight, Harry gets back to school and then this teacher that's been helping him takes him away and reveals his evilness.
This brilliant movie then ends with the very moving question from Hermione, "Everything is going to change now isn't it?" to which Harry responds with a very simple "yes" and they proceed to joke about not writing to each other the summer of the return of the most evil and feared wizard of all-time.
The description above is exactly how I saw and heard the movie; meaningless and dry. Voldemort returns but there is no emotion, no reaction from the characters who have been dreading this movement.
*takes a breath* well.....that's my rant for the fourth HP movie. Took a lot longer to type out here than it does for me to go off when it comes up in conversation. My rant for one aspect of the 3rd movie, strongly tied to my rant about the 7th movie, tends to be much louder and probably slightly incoherent.
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