HP5 Movie: A Review

Pottermania is here, and we saw the movie Thursday night. Spoilers ahead.

The things that stood out:

1. Believable relationship between Harry and Sirius. They seemed to spend more time together in the movie than in the book, and they truly seemed to have a real relationship. Plus, the movie Sirius was less of a whiny hothead than in the book, and so his death felt more momentous.
2. Nymphadora Tonks--perfectly cast, criminally underused.
3. Luna Lovegood--perfect. Absolutely perfect.
4. Ginny Weasley--still in the background, and few (possibly no) lines. But we get to see her being an amazingly talented witch.
5. Bellatrix Lestrange--again, perfectly cast, but a bit more 'eye-rolling' crazy than the woman we saw in Book 6.
6. Occlumency lessons. Incredibly shortened, but very effectively done: we see all the stuff we need to see, plus Snape gets to be the one to end the lessons.
7. James Potter looks like Harry, in the Mirror of Erised, even more in the photo of the original Order of the Phoenix, and especially as a Hogwarts student. Wonderful casting.
8. Grawp was beautifully done, huge, scary, but somehow loveable. Fitting for Hagrid's half-brother.
9. The betrayal of the DA was altered, but did all the work it needed to in a cleverly compact way. Harry's crush, Cho Chang, is the one who informs Umbridge, but only because of Veritaserum. Still, that ends the crush and clears her out of the way for Harry to find his true girlfriend in number 6.
10. Umbridge. Umbridge, Umbridge, Umbridge. She was even more insidious than in the book, because she kept the patronizing faux charm going until the very end.

This was a dark movie, the tone reinforced by the cinematography. Grimmauld Place was dark and grim and horrible. The Department of Mysteries was all black shiny ceramic tile and eerie gray light. The thestrals were suitably creepy looking and bony and leathery, yet somehow the thestral foal was still cute.

Sadly, the Ron/Hermione chemistry is just not there. Hermione and Harry have a visible and believable connection that is just missing between Ron and Hermione. Just as Harry hasn't said two words to Ginny, or even really noticed her--the pairings are just not gelling as they should. I don't miss the extended Quidditch scenes, but it was as teammates that Harry and Ginny had something in common, and we just aren't getting to see it.

This was a very efficient movie, and packed a whole lot of plot into two and a quarter hours. I'm already trying to decide when to see it again.