Harry Potter and the Chopped To Bits Story

Rating: Null/10 (8 June 2004)

Okay. I am going to get creamed by the condescending film buffs out there, who love "interesting angles, amazing cuts and fabulous photography." This is, after all, what we have come to in modern film-making: lots of arty shots, to heck with story telling that makes sense and definitely to heck with pacing that allows one time to reflect on previous events.

PoA's pacing, such as it was, was breakneck-Saturday-Morning-Serial style for the short attention span crowd. (Yeah, I'm being condescending now.) No time for thought, for exposition, for reflection, thinking or character development. Let's just have onedamnthingafteranother. I've seen/heard critics claiming this makes for a tighter, shorter movie...but somehow, when those two hours were up, I felt as if I'd been sitting there half my life and it wasn't the good half.
I've heard the cries "It's not the BOOK! It's only BASED on the book! You people have to understand that an entire book can't be filmed." Okay, sure. It's based on a book that millions of people love and respect. I don't understand this idolization of and praise for Cuaron's choppy, herky-jerky style of direction. Is it because today if it doesn't keep moving-moving-moving we can't waste time watching it. Yes, they call them "movies" for a reason, but movies, literate movies, also are there to make you think. This wasn't "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" where you're there to watch things happen one after another. This was supposed to be a film of a book in which there is a mystery, with clues pointing to the resolution of the mystery.
But the clues were mostly tossed out with the speed of light, the explanation (when it came and what little there was of it) was delivered by Gary Oldman at a pace so fast his mouth would have reached the finish line before Smarty Jones was out of the box. Everyone talked so darned FAST and moved so darned fast there was no time to say "Oh, THAT'S what the moon's appearance meant" "THAT'S why this happened...."
There is also the matter of plot elements being left out. PoA is a long book. Of course, it was necessary to leave out scenes, combine several characters into one and condense things that happen and even tweak in some changes. But why, if time was so of the essence, was it then necessary to drag out the whole Knight Bus sequence? Funny? Sure. Necessary to the plot? Hardly. If you can't spare three minutes for an explanation of the Marauder's Map (who created it and why) then why spare three minutes for the kids eating the animal noise candies? What did that add? Not a bloody thing. Why was so much film and time wasted on the ghost horsemen crashing through windows when the background of the Patronus spell was sacrificed? The former may have added atmosphere, but the latter is important to Harry's development as a character. And since Buckbeak is a very important subplot, why spend three minutes on Harry's wild ride, but barely thirty seconds on the information that Buckbeak has been sentenced to death??? For a film so concerned with the theme of time, not much thought was put into the importance of time at all.
In the end, while the movie seemed jam-packed with events, it was ultimately empty, without warmth, without soul and completely without heart. Glossy, bright, slick and BORING.