A Week Before D-Day, and Things Have Turned A Little Sour

Here's an unusual question for Harry Potter fans: Is watching the latest Potter movie the best preparation for reading the newest Potter book? The guys up at Warner Bros must obviously have felt that the answer to that question is yes, a feeling that will most likely be vindicated by the bumper box office returns Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is bound to get. On the flip side, of course, Deathly Hallows is releasing on the 21st of this month, almost exactly one week after the opening of Phoenix, and heaven help Warner Bros if they think Potter fans are going to spare even a sideways glance for Harry's frustrating struggles with Dolores Umbridge when they could instead be grappling with monumental things like Snape being evil after all or horror of horrors, Harry himself going out with a painful death. But that's not the only problem the movie faces. I hate to admit this, but Phoenix suffers greatly from a tad too many over-creative liberties taken by the director David Yates, who perhaps needs to be told by someone that you just cannot fit an 800-page long book into a 2 hr 20 min short movie. Math, anyone?

The best that can be said about OOTP (Order of the Phoenix, for the uninformed) is that it is better than the first two Potter movies. The movie satisfies the hardcore Potter fans in managing to squeeze in nearly every important event from the book, but sadly, that very intent makes many of the scenes look rushed and fleeting. As for the changes from the book, well, let's just say that Yates should have had a serious chat with Alfonso Cuaron (the director of Prisoner of Azkaban) or even Peter Jackson, for that matter, about the do's and dont's of bringing new plot details in a hugely popular book before even thinking of directing the movie. Most of the changes in OOTP seem forced and unnecessary, and it only my fear of being labelled a raving/lunatic/obsessed Potter freak that's stopping me from listing all of those disagreeable changes here. Many sequences in the movie have an unfinished, anti-climactic feel about them (note the vapid end to the scene where Trelawney is sacked or the irritatingly docile reactions of Ron and Hermione to Umbridge's torture tactics). Sirius's death is butchered mercilessly, and Harry's outburst in Dumbledore's office, one of the most poignant episodes in the books, never comes to pass. Bellatrix Lestrange looks like a deranged medieval witch most of the times, and Grawp the Giant looks cute rather than scary. Ok, maybe I am sounding like a raving/lunatic/obsessed Potter freak after all, but who cares?

The special effects are fairly satisfactory, but the acting from the Trio is not. Alright, I'll leave out Rupert Grint from this - he's been consistently decent right from the first movie; but will someone please tell Daniel Radcliffe that he needs to put something on his face, like say, expressions? Emma Watson looks all pretty and charming (which Hermione is NOT supposed to be), but would definitely make things a lot more tolerable for everyone if she just stopped making her eyebrows continually dance like they're preparing for a ballet, or even if she refrained from delivering EVERY line looking like she's terribly out of breath. The older actors, on the other hand, put in very good performances, particularly Jason Isaacs, who as the pure evil/subservient Lucius Malfoy steals the show from everyone (including Gary Oldman in another appropriate Sirius Black turn). Imelda Staunton as Umbridge is almost perfect, specially with the 'Hem, hem' rendition and the revolting girlish wickedness, and there could not have been a better choice to play Luna Lovegood than Evanna Lynch. However, my biggest grouse with the Potter movies remains the shoddy portrayal of perhaps the third most important character in the books, Severus Snape. Alan Rickman may be a fine actor, but it is simply unacceptable that the makers have chosen to reduce Snape to a bumbling, comical idiot whose most significant moment is hitting Ron with a book. It's amazing how I seem to be the only one who finds fault with Snape's portrayal in the movies, but J K Rowling had always intended for Snape to be a no-nonsense, vicious, supremely smug persona, and the movie Snape is anything but that. I seriously cannot understand how they're going to undo all the damage they've done to Snape's character when he comes into its own in Book 6, the title of which, funnily enough, is named after him. In my book, Isaacs would have actually done a marvellous job as Snape, but will anyone listen to the true Potter fan?

The one thing that can be said about OOTP is that it hardly ever gets boring (ok, maybe the first half is a little boring, but you can't really blame Yates for that - nothing much happens in the first half of the book either). It would've been all perfectly good fun if it wasn't for the inescapable fact that it is an adaptation of a Harry Potter book, which naturally makes us pick at and frown at every minor detail which is inconsistent with the spirit of the book. It would also have helped greatly if they'd taken the trouble to explain everything about the plot adequately enough (my non-Potterized friends kept breaking out into perfectly understandable questions like, "what the hell is going on?"). And while we're talking about explaining things, I shudder to think how they're going to do that in Movie 6 with things as complex as Horcruxes flying around, specially if they're going to be hell-bent on sacrificing justice to the books for cash-generating ploys like keeping the length short. Alfonso Cuaron, where art thou?