Order of the Phoenix Was Not Worth Staying Up Until 3:00 a.m.

It seems that whenever J.K. Rowling writes a book more than 500 pages in length, the movie version inevitably sucks. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — which I saw with Andy and friends at midnight last night — felt so utterly thrown together. There were many places where the filmmakers departed from the tremendous depth of storytelling in the book and relied on stupid contrivances to hold together what was little more than a sequential re-enactment of the most visually stimulating moments from the book.

Here are just a few of the many issues I had with the film:

1. The first chapter was all wrong. The book starts off with an ennui-ridden Harry spending the summer in Little Whinging without a shred of news about the return of Voldemort. His frustration and anger at his wizarding friends, and the massive unfairness of life with the Dursleys sets the tone for the rest of the book, in which Harry is a first-class prat a good deal of the time — as teenage boys are prone to be.

   The movie took away all of that underlying motivation and went straight into the scene in which Harry and his horrible cousin are attacked by dementors. They don’t mention that Mrs. Figg is a squib. They don’t mention anything about Mundungus Fletcher going off after dodgy cauldrons. Rowling sets the whole rising action up so brilliantly in the book. The movie could have done it justice with just a couple extra minutes of screen time.

2. Fudge’s motivation for not believing Voldemort is back is all wrong. They don’t explain until halfway through the movie that Fudge isn’t simply in denial because You-Know-Who was so terrible. His true motivation in the book is his fear and jealousy of Dumbledore’s popularity and brilliance. This pops out unexpectedly with no set-up halfway through the film.




3. Umbridge isn’t nearly evil enough. Actress Imelda Staunton got the false, girlish sweetness down pat. But her performance did nothing to demonstrate the truly evil nature of this woman. In the book, I seethed right along with Harry at the injustice of Umbridge’s rise to power at Hogwarts. In the film, her role was so one-dimensional that she didn’t make me angry at all.
4. No Quidditch. And no “Weasley is our King” either.
5. Nothing about Ron and Hermione being prefects.
6. No Marietta Edgecombe. Instead, Cho Chang is the traitor, and there’s nothing about veritaserum in the book. And no brilliant Hermione’s enchanted parchment.
7. The Weasley’s departure was quite lackluster. No everlasting swamp in the corridor.

I could go on about the many reasons why this movie didn’t live up to the book, but those were the big ones. I don’t think they should be making films of these books at all if they can’t do them right.