"What's life without a few dragons?"

Rating: 8/10 (12 May 2012)

I find myself prefacing these reviews by saying that I haven't read the Potter books, so my approach to how I write them is strictly as a viewer of the movies. I found 'Goblet of Fire' to be quite entertaining even if more to the dark side than the first three films, however I was struck by a fair amount of inconsistencies in the story telling that kept raising question marks as the story progressed. The first would have been the abrupt end to the Quidditch World Cup when the Death Eaters made their appearance and transformed the landscape to Armageddon. That happened so quickly that I was left scratching my head, wondering what just happened and why the transition was done that way.
With the first challenge, the thing that struck me was that there was no way that anyone in the stadium could have possibly seen what was going on with Harry against the horntail dragon. Prior to that, the viewer never gets to see what happened with the other three contestants against their dragon foes. That just seemed odd to me, but not as odd as the the way the story handled the next set of challenges. With all the buildup as to the dangerous nature of the Triwizard Tournament and how it had to follow a strict set of rules, it made no sense to me that Fleur Delacour would have been allowed to participate in the third challenge after having given up in the second. Did that bother anyone else?
Then there's the question of You-Know-Who, or the dreaded Valdemort. The previous stories made a fairly big deal of not mentioning the name of Valdemort outright, but it was thrown around here rather handily. Then, when he finally made his first appearance in the series, Harry managed to get by him without too much trouble. I don't know, I just thought that their first meeting would have been given to more epic proportion, but there's a few more chapters in this story, so I can wait.
Now I don't know anything about J.K. Rowling's political ideology or world view, but with the Triwizard Tournament, I couldn't help but consider how the participants were represented. Hogwarts would have been the stand-in for England, that's pretty obvious. Oddly, the Russian team was called Durmstrang, the word apparently a composite of the German expression 'sturm und drang' which translates fairly literally to 'storm and stress', which for the teens of the competing academies would have accurately reflected their own emotional stress as students and as young men and women contemplating the angst of their formative years. But what about Beaubaxton? Do they represent France or the larger European Union, now under considerable turmoil, though that wouldn't have been the case when Rowling initially wrote her novels? In hindsight though, I think it's an interesting speculation.
Anyway, I probably put more thought into this apart from the main story line than is necessary. In general I liked the film well enough, and at this point in the series it could be my favorite, but that could be because the characters are older and the story elements come across as more mature. I look forward to watching the remaining chapters in the series.