From Hogwarts With Love, Some Of It Forgotten

Rating: Null/10 (22 June 2004)

I saw this movie 1 and 1/3 times; the 1/3 stemming from the fact that the first time the sound broke down to unacceptable quality due to some unsolvable technical glitch. So a week later, I tried again, and got to enjoy the entire movie.
I was quite pleased with this episode of Rowlings saga. The story hobbles along at a nice pace, and the special effects are gorgeous. Even more importantly, they are strictly under control of the story, helping it along, instead of the story riding on the crest of a major CGI wave. ('Van Helsing' anyone?) The story has dark elements which young children will find downright scary, and at one point you can see quite clearly that the director took care to keep his little viewers from wetting themselves---a movie for grownups would have had an entirely different scene! The actors are relaxed and settle into their roles quite well, although you can see that some are unlikely to become great actors. Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) is the clearest example. But hey, Rupert is still a teen, so let's cut the guy some slack. Speaking of teens, I pity Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy). Puberty has not been kind to him, he used to be such an angelic little devil... Oh well ;-).
But.
But indeed. For some unfathomable reason, the director saw fit to rip major elements out of the storyline, leaving people who have not read the book with lots of open questions. How come Lupin and Black know, and more importantly, trust each other? The latter is after all an escaped convict, a known and avid supporter of You-know-who! How come Lupin knows how to use the Marauders Map, obviously having seen it before? Why is Snape so keen on catching Black? Why is Harry so sure he saw his father conjuring up the Patronus? Why would anyone have the ratty and altogether unagreeable Pettigrew for a friend? What is with Trelawney's prediction? And so on. It would have been the work of a few minutes at most to have Lupin explain to Harry at one point that he, Black, Pettigrew and Potter sr. were very close friends despite his being a werewolf, that his friends learned to become Faunates so he wouldn't feel so alone, that the Map was created to help them crawl about, and explained that Snape was the butt of many of their jokes. There, in just one sentence, all major questions answered. So why didn't the director do this?
I can only speculate to the answer, but I do know that answers are central to many elements in the Potter saga, and deserve to be depicted. Of course a director will always take some liberties with the original story, but in this case he went too far. As it stands now, the movie is just unsatisfyingly incomplete, and that is a great shame for such an enjoyable work.
In the end, go see this movie if you like this sort of thing, and hope that the fourth episode doesn't make mistakes of this magnitude. An undeserved 7 out of 10, from a 9 out of 10 if the storyline had not been mangled.