[From old Bitweaver-powered site; originally posted 1-15-2006]

I finally saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire today. My opinion: it sucked. For one thing, they cut out so much stuff that there was basically no time to think; it was just one action-packed scene after another. Another problem was that when they cut out subplots, they left loose ends that just confused people. An example of this is Rita Skeeter. We see two of her original three stories, but we never find out how she’s getting this information. In their attempts to shorten it, they also managed to cut lots of things that are important in book 5. For example, we never see Rita’s article “Harry Potter: Disturbed and Dangerous,” nor Fudge’s reaction to it, which are both cornerstones of the plot in book 5. In fact, we never see any of Dumbledore’s argument with Fudge at the end of the book, which, again, is vital to the plot of book 5. And we also miss out on Dumbledore’s explanation of Prioti Incantatum, as well as all the fun stuff about Snape being a spy (Snape’s spy status is mentioned in passing in the pensieve, but we miss out on Dumbledore ordering him to go make contact with the Death Eaters, as well as Snape discovering Sirius’s identity). And why do we not find out anything about Hagrid and Maxime being half-giant? And why is Maxime so much taller than Hagrid?

And the special effects just plain suck. For example, in the underwater scene, the stunt doubles for Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, and Katie Leung look nothing like the real actors. You’d think that in a PG-13 movie with this budget, they’d digitally change the doubles’ faces to look more like the original actors, but it seems WB got lazy. Also, is it just me, or does Voldemort look wimpy? He’s not remotely scary. They mutated him so much that he looks not like a deformed human (disturbing), but like an alien life form that you would guess might be quite attractive to members of the same species. And what happened to his red eyes? Anything with red eyes is scary, so why did they not bother to do that to him? The fact that his face is vaguely snakelike doesn’t change the fact that he looks stupid, almost comical, and definitelty not scary. Oh, and Emma Watson needs to work on her fake crying. It looks immensely crappy and faked.

Also, they are carrying on the proud WB tradition of mispronouncing Harry Potter words. Examples of words that have been mispronounced by WB so far are: Voldemort (the T should be silent), Animagus (the G should be pronounced like a J), Beauxbatons (the accent should be on the first syllable), and Accio (it should be pronounced “Ahsseo”, not “Ahckeo”).

And why the heck does Dumbledore appear to be mentally unstable in this movie? He’s constantly yelling at people (at Harry, and at Barty Crouch Jr.). In the books, he’s always so calm and collected; in this movie, you think the guy needs to switch to decaf.

My last complaint is that when Cedric is killed, Avada Kedavra pushes him back. In the books, AK always just makes the victim fall over dead. There are various hypotheses about the significance of this in the books, since Snape’s AK against Dumbledore in book 6 makes him fly into the air and fall off the tower. The conspiracy theorists think this means that Dumbledore faked his death. While I’m not going to get into the details of that discussion, it was stupid for WB to screw that up, since there’s a chance that it will screw them over in movie 7.