Very disappointing ... (think of 'Batman and Robin')

Rating: 2/10 (5 June 2004)

I went to see the film with five small children (ages 6 to 9) ... while they all quite enjoyed it, none of them enthused about it, which is pretty damning given the huge success of the first two films.
My immediate impression at the start of the film was one of poor photography, with all the color knocked back. This was presumably intended to create a gloomy impression, but just made things look less realistic and, because the colour/lighting was the same throughout, any chance of using these to emphasis mood where appropriate was lost.
Consistency of settings was poor, in that the settings around Hogwarts used in this film differ quite markedly from the first two films, and seem less faithful to the books. There appears to have been a failed attempt to create the sense of oppression (called for in the story) by making the settings shabby/grim rather than attempting to demonstrate it through the dialogue/acting.
The acting generally was fine (I particularly liked professor Trelawny, but Sirius Black was also good, even if a more haggard appearance would have helped) ... but the actors were not given much of a script to work with, character and tension building conversations being omitted in favour of quick jumps between action sequences, leaving the audience uninvolved/unmoved by the special effects. This omission of psychological depth in the scripting in favour of action, to the point where the action becomes meaningless, is the reason that the awful 'Batman and Robin' film springs to mind. The attempts to show the psychology of the story were generally heavy handed and perfunctory and thus counterproductive. Some elements made no sense unless you had read the book (in which case they served as reminders to threads of the plot left out of the file), while others were actually wrong (eg. Harry seeing the Grim in the clouds) in that they created a different impression from that in the book.
After the reviews I had read/heard, this film was very disappointing. The impression most reviews give is that the film is dark and scary, but the darkness is just in the photography, not the atmosphere, and the uninvolving nature of the script/production prevents even good special effects being at all scary ... the kids watched it pretty impassively ... no jumps or clenching of tightly held hands etc.