Product: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)
Rating: 4.0
To be fair...
Anyone who expects the films to have the same strengths as the books is quite frankly naive. Film and book are two totally different media and both can be appreciated if you just get over the protective snobbery you hold in favour of the one you encountered first.As far as I'm concerned Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is the best Harry Potter film yet. Forget you ever read the book, and just see it as a film. It works well, apart from the slightly annoying bit at the end where Harry asks Dumbledore why the wands joined and he says "priori incantatem" and leaves it at that.Compared with the other HP films, the acting is better, the humour is funnier, the drama is tenser, the euphoria is happier, the horror is scarier and the emotion is, possibly for the first time, genuinely touching- I nearly cried when Harry brought Cedric out of the maze.My message is: if you've read the books, please be reasonable. Don't expect each film to be a 10-hour, carefully crafted masterpiece, with every aspect of the novel still intact. It's not going to happen. It's still possible to enjoy the films though- see them as pure entertainment, something to quickly bring to mind the total beauty of the books. Don't be stuck up about it- in doing this it's only you that's missing out- on a film which is genuinely funny, scary and sad and which is perfectly capable of entertaining generations of people- not on the same level that the novels do, but on a different level which is not objectively better or worse- just different.