Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Review)

Posted by ad on Nov 15, 2005 in Film | 0 comments

This post originally appeared on Screen*Play.

Everything’s going to change. – Hermione Granger

To say I was really looking forward to this film would be an understatement and disservice to my friend Andy who has listened to me talk about it for the last year, and even more so over the past two weeks.

In August, I read the fourth installment of the Harry Potter series cover-to-cover (750 pgs) in three days. An accomplishment considering the dozens of abandoned books that haunt me from the closet I consciously avoid in my apartment. What I found so incredible about it is the biggest miss of the film – the themes and writing aged with the characters.

Harry, Ron and Hermione are 14 now and the writing fully reflects the complexity of that age. The narrative did a phenomenal job of capturing the awkward changes we go through when realizing that we don’t just want to play with our best boy or girl friend anymore, but we want to kiss them. The wizards and witches of Hogwarts are now looking at each other differently, but are still young enough that it’s all a bit confusing and innocent. With the intro of romantic feelings came subtle sexual innuendo.

Goblet of Fire also moves them into another adult theme – death. It’s been hovering all along, but when it actually happens, it’s shocking and sad. It’s the first time in the series that a character with more than a passing storyline dies. We realize as readers, as the above quote says, everything’s going to change. It had to or the books would likely have fizzled out as a children’s series. But they didn’t, and that’s possibly why many think of the fourth book as the best one. It showed us exactly where J.K. Rowling was going to take us in those seven years through seven books…on an adventure that acknowledged the reader was getting older, just as the characters were and the writing was going to as well. None of this made it into the film.

Rather, the film is mainly about Harry’s experience in the Tri-Wizard Tournament – not about the changes they’re experiencing, the characters of the story or hardly about Voldemort. Even the relationship between the three principles was sacrificed and altered.

While the tournament is a spectacle to watch, the cost to make it so was too high. Where painstaking detail was poured into this element of the film, in the book it is an instrument to convey their age. Harry is just 14, too young and inexperienced for the Tri-Wizard Tournament. If not for the help and manipulation of others, he would never have made it and the price could have been his life.

That said, is it worth the price of a ticket to see this film – yes, if you haven’t read the book. The acting is great, special effects are incredible, the cinematography amazing and may not come off as butchered. For those who have read the book, the five minutes where Voldemort is on screen are chilling.

The films have moved to an 18 month schedule as the actors are getting older – fast – but their characters clearly are not. Shooting begins in February for Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, for a summer 2007 release. I’ll be reading that one over Thanksgiving.