The Order of the Phoenix
Chrissy and I finally got out to Portage to see the fifth Harry Potter movie. We saw it on the IMAX screen, so the last twenty minutes were in 3D. I had been looking forward to seeing it since long before it was released. Chrissy had not read the fifth book, but I had listened to the books-on-tape version from the library when it first came out. We both really enjoyed it, but I couldn’t help but notice differences between the books and the movies again.
There were a few bits that were completely missing from the book. In the book, Hermione forms the house-elf liberation front, known as SPEW. I never liked this subplot, so I didn’t mind it being cut from the movie. The fifth year Quidditch season saw Harry booted off the team, so I guess they decided that Quidditch wasn’t necessary in the movie. However, this is where both Ron and Ginny really get a chance to shine, so it was too bad that it had to go. In fact, I don’t think that Ginny got one line in the movie, although she got an appreciable amount of screen time. There was a Centuar teacher in there somewhere, although I seem to remember that being a tiny subplot. Lastly, Hagrid’s visit to the giants was nowhere to be seen.
Even though the movie was already two and a half hours long, they did try to fit things in where they could. Some things that played a bigger part in the book were at least mentioned in the movie, possibly for continuity’s sake (these are seen in books six and seven). For example, the book goes into detail about how the painting of Sirius Black’s mother perpetually complains about “mudbloods in her house”. They showed the painting briefly while introducing Kreature, though she was under a sheet (Kreature was polishing her frame). Also in the Black House, you see “Andromeda” stricken from the family tree, but they don’t explain that she left to marry Ted Tonks, a muggle (and sire Nymphadora Tonks).
Percival Weasly had a forceful split from the family, choosing to side with the Ministry of Magic, which was a huge problem in the book. In the movie, they didn’t touch on this at all, although Percy did show up with Fudge to arrest Dumbledore (they didn’t name him, so you would just have to recognize him from previous movies). Another subplot from the book was when Harry sees that his father wasn’t such a nice guy back in the day, in that he would torment Snape for no reason. The movie shows James torturing Snape, but they gloss over it as an excuse for Snape to cancel Harry’s Occulemency lessons. I’ll be looking forward to see if they fill in these gaps by releasing an “extended cut” on DVD this Christmas.
The last twenty minutes were in 3D. It wasn’t like the shows at Disneryworld, however, where things fly off the screen and you’re sort of reaching out into the air to touch them. Instead, this form of 3D was more like a ViewMaster, with the screen being layered into a distinct backbround, middleground and foreground. It was a very interesting effect in the Department of Mysteries, with towers of shelves crashing from the background to the foreground. I would have liked to see some spells flying off the screen towards me, but it wasn’t that kind of 3D. It was still worth the added expense of seeing the IMAX version, though.
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