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Harry Potter and the OOTP

// December 12th, 2007 // Personal

And no that does not stand for object oriented toilet paper.

Just finished watching this last night and my initial thoughts are – well done guys. I make no secret of my hatred for the first two films with sickly sweet themes, child actors that couldn’t and a general gloss of saccharine strong enough to induce diabetes in all but the most “awwww” hardened.

The Prisoner of Azkaban changed things for the better. A much darker world, better acting (mostly due to the slow maturity of the cast) and some fantastic realisations of key  Potter themes made for a much more enjoyable viewing experience.

So OOTP was a movie I approached with caution. Almost any Potter fan will agree the book was the worst of the bunch, slow, paranoid and generally unpleasant to wade through not to mention about 200 pages too long. The film was a triumph. They had managed to trim most of the rubbish whilst keeping the overall theme of them vs us and transform the lackluster pace of the book into a speedy romp through the most difficult phase in Potter’s life to date.

The only question I would have concerns the ending of the movie – it seemed a little rushed. Battle at Ministry, mandatory Potter semi consciousness looked over by his friends and then home for tea and war against the dark lord TBC …  That said, this problem is going to be present in the next movie as well, both stories suffer (benefit?) from a certain quantity of “Empire” in their lack of conclusions.

All in all? HP&TOOTP gets a pretty cool 4 out of 5… and it will look so much better on Blu Ray (more on that later)