Harry Potter has run PAST his course

Rating: 1/10 (7 September 2007)

On Friday night, I went to see the long awaited Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix release 2007 and heaved a strong heartfelt sigh  when it finally ended. I couldn't believe the mess of hodge-podge facts, characters and special affects tossed into two hours wasted sitting in the theater. Boring from the beginning to end, I was sorely tempted to leave prematurely.
The first two Harry Potter films were rather unique and unusual and had a significant depth of plot, characterization, and enough surprise affects to make it interesting. By movies three and four, the characters were getting hackneyed, the entire landscape of Hogwarts changed, and of course, the cast lost the artistic genius of Richard Harris who had perfected Dumbledore.
However, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the entire movie was one special affect after another with no gradual build-up of the characters. More and more new characters were brought in up until almost the final scene. The flow of the movie gave no release to the viewer with highs and lows but just continual adrenalin charges.
Which is even a worse film-making crime than introducing new characters in a movie/plot in the last scenes is finishing a movie with even one subplot without closure which was done to at least five. Apparent cheating in this movie by tossing "newspaper" details at the screen to wound up a few of the subplots was a cheap step and the headlines were presented too fast to read the gist of the story so the viewer is left without a feeling of completion.
Another obvious cheat to film-making is cutting from scene to scene without any gradual fading and killing off more and more characters that are considered "loved" ones of Harry, but are not really dead, are they? Put all this with the entire thread of the plot that weaves through all sequels  Lord Voldemort's connection with Harry is getting stronger  is giving a flavor not too unfamiliar to that of the 1970s Star Wars Luke Skywalker's connection to Darth Vader. Harry's father's new character flaw in correlation with Professor Snape seems to lead in this way as well.
Remakes and sequels are very tricky films to make successfully and to be believable. I think the Harry Potter series has run to its dreary conclusion, although another one is probably coming.