Perfunctory, crude, and gimmicky

Rating: 2/10 (6 June 2004)

First things first: I took five kids to this. Aged from six to ten. I had been warned it might be too scary for the six year old. At the end they said "so where are we going to eat?". The six year old had barely jumped. This is Not Good. The rest of the audience looked the same. Distinctly underwhelmed. It works like this:
* Right, we want it dark. Let's desaturate the colour. [Like everyone who's ever mucked about with Photoshop does on their first batch of pictures, and then grows out of it]
* OK, we are going to make a big thing about time at the end. Let's have a HUGE clock with a big sweeping pendulum in the hall all the way through. [If you haven't got the point of the big sweeping pendulum by the third time you see it, you clearly have no central nervous system.]
* Hey, the CGI people have done a pretty good job with Buckbeak. Let's expand that bit, and squeeze all the boring story and character interaction out so we can have time for some interesting running around in the forest with CGI monsters instead. [PLEASE can film makers stop being impressed with CGI for the sake of it? I know I have."The special effects are great" is almost a gold seal for a rubbish film these days.]
* And while we're at the CGI let's make the Dementors fly around in the air, that'll make them more scary. [It doesn't. For a lesson in how to make things scary six inches off the ground, watch The Gentlemen episode of Buffy.]
This really is the level of thinking on which this film operates. The script has been stripped down to the bare minimum to allow the events of the story to progress as fast as possible. This is fifteen minutes shorter than the others. Why?
I don't mean stripped in comparison with the book, I mean in comparison with a script that is ABOUT something. This film is about... well, nothing very much. Nothing actually HAPPENS in this movie, events just follow one another breathlessly. Regardless of whether it starts as a screenplay of a book or just a screenplay, any film needs than mere events. This seemed to have been written in shorthand, because all depth of character, all psychological development, all tension and humour have been left somewhere on the cutting room floor, if they were ever in at all. Same scriptwriter, so I hope it was all there and cut and can be put back to a DVD version. PLEASE.... And nobody tell me there was spare, efficient storytelling and it was between the lines. It wasn't. It wasn't anywhere. "So where are we going to eat?" is not the reaction to a good story.
And the setting! I can take that they change the castle, filmed things somewhere else (largely on a computer it seems) but they changed the whole tone of the place. Hogwarts WAS a generous building with rolling lawns, a very clearly thriving, well-kept, comfortable, rich institution with some fine mountains around it that could be rather bleak in wintry circumstances. Suddenly it is small, seems to have lost most of its pupils (are extras suddenly costing a lot more?) is permanently miserable and there are WEEDS growing in the TINY main courtyard. Visually, this is a minor, second- or third-rate school on its last legs, not the magical equivalent of Eton. Presumably this is just another clunky shortcut to a dark and threatening atmosphere, but it simply meant that you didn't feel anything good or worthwhile was being threatened: no contrast between the world Harry is supposed to love and the thing menacing it.
I gave this a two, almost entirely for the actors, who are doing a brave job with material thinned to the point of non-existence, and couldn't know that they were all going to look so grey and ill in the finished item. I hear there's another director again for the fourth film. Good.