short film from a long book

Rating: 7/10 (23 November 2005)

Concise edited highlights, although what was kept in was done very well. Although the film is two and a half hours, there are some very abrupt cuts from one scene to another, and a lot is out of sequence. That said, there are some scenes which are directly from the book, while others are similar but missing a key point - when the boys are oggling the Beauxbaton girls, Hermione has a good retort - "if you too would like to put yours eyes back in" instead we just get a shot of her looking annoyed. One or two changes which I liked were the dance lessons, and the rebirth of Voldemort. Some of the things I disliked were very obvious mistakes, like Voldemort having normal eyes, the cup being made of crystal instead of silver, Amos having no beard, a lot of missing characters, wormtail cutting off his hand with no reaction, he should be writhing on the ground in pain and so on. I dislike changes being made to the story for no apparent reason. There is very little in the books that would not work on screen, and having read Steve Kloves scripts for the first three films I think he did a very good job. Pity we did not see his script on screen. I still think each book should be done as a mini series to cover all the details and bring to life jo's wonderful dialogue.