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Old 03-17-2008, 11:40 AM   #3160
RLacey
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Yesterday I rewatched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for the first time since seeing it in the cinema. Today I watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for the first time ever.

My opinion of this series becomes more mixed as it goes on. I thought that the first two films were pretty rubbish, mostly on account of some pretty dire acting on the part of the very young leads. When Prisoner of Azkaban came out I was surprised by how much better it was; not only did it adopt a darker tone (which I always like), but the acting seemed to have improved too.

So where do I stand after the fifth film? Well, the acting has continued to improve, but it still feels more than a tad wooden from the child cast. Maybe I'm just being picky.

I was more surprised, however, to see that Order of the Phoenix is about half an hour shorter than Goblet of Fire. I'd be the first to suggest that book number five is far, far too long (particularly for a story that goes almost nowhere), but the attempts to condense it here don't really appear to have worked. I'm not a fan of the token romance with Cho, but script pressures mean that it only half develops in this film (I will be interested to see how they undo it in time for the next film), and a number of other bits seem rushed (Umbridge, for instance, seems to take over the school after about five minutes).

That said, good special effects all round, and I liked the fight scene in the Ministry, even if it was mostly spectacle rather than substance. Overall, they're quite fun, and possibly as good as they could realistically have been, but they're certainly not perfect.
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