Tuesday 18 October 2016

Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix (2007)


Directed by: David Yates
Written by: J.K. Rowling (novel) & Michael Goldenberg (screenplay)

Harry Potter returns to the wizard world only to realise very few people have taken Voldemort's return seriously, and the ministry is trying to discredit both him and Dumbledore.


Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the first Harry Potter movie directed by David Yates. Some fans love Yates and his different style, but there are people who don't like him, myself included. Sure, he's the one responsible for my favourite half of the series, where Harry is growing up and everything is darker. But in the movies the characters aren't as deep and the darkness feels more like a colour scheme than a change in the story telling.

Yates's style chooses action over the story - which makes no sense when considering what the novel was like. Order of the Phoenix had very little action, but it explored wonderfully, for example, Harry after seeing Voldemort returning and seeing Cedric Diggory being brutally murdered. In the movie you can see it bothers Harry, he is incredibly angry, but that's that. If you haven't read the book it only seems like Harry is having his puberty and therefore a bit moody, even if you could claim he has a case of PTSD. 

There are many emotional scenes in the novel that weren't included in the movie. They were completely forgotten or replaced by something really, really weird, apart from few that were important to the plot - they saved the scenes that were important when looking at this one movie, but ignored the story as a whole, and they seemed to figure character development was not that important. Harry Potter series is not seven separate stories it's one story in seven parts. 

At this point it's clear the filmmakers didn't care about the story as much as making the movies and making fans watch them and just get through the whole series. 

But it's lovely to see the film allowing few characters develop properly: like Neville during the DA. They tried to fake Ginny developing as well by only showing us that she is indeed amazing with spells. Still the filmmakers have forgotten to give her any sort of personality. I love her in the books but in movies she's just an empty husk - skillful of course, but she's not as interesting as in the books. 
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Order of Phoenix is over-simplified and is trying to force a story into a film form in the easiest way possible. Yes, sure, they didn't have so much time to focus on the stories individually considering the stars were growing up but still, this is ridiculous. 

☆☆☆☆
4 / 10

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