Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

My rating: *** and 1/2

The aficionado that I am for this scarhead character, the least I could do to remind myself of my fanship is to catch the latest screen adaptation on the first day of its release. And after a very long time indeed, I felt sorry. No need to get impatient yet. If you think I am going to spend the rest of my review slashing the movie to pieces, you couldn’t be more…. oh well read on.

Adapted from what I consider to be the real series defining book (even more definitive reading than the 1st 3 instalments put together)–the action was so fast I was sweating, the pace so frenetic it got me dizzy, and the sequences, scares, surprises, revelations, creatures, magic so crazily yet so intelligently built up for the absolute grand finale that 2 years on and the experience of reading was still fresh by July this year. And then the Half Blood Prince came out. And I re-read parts of Goblet of Fire again to get my facts right

Which meant that I went to the movie with a lot of baggage indeed and this is why I felt sorry for myself as I sat there for 3 hours munching my popcorn away. It was like seeing a thriller when you know the twists, when you know who kills who and who dies in the end. And to make it even worse was the film, yes Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire, itself— a film so amazingly yet so obediently adapted that everytime a well-shot scary sequence came with a “bang” and someone screamed in the theatre, I just sat there like “Oh well, I saw that coming for over 5 minutes now”. And throughout the whole movie, it was all about “Tom Riddle’s house is just as I had imagined”, “Oh no, Cho is nowhere as cute as I’d thought she’d be”, “Dammit, they don’t have house-elves or what”, “Ah, the Dark Mark is scarier than I had thought” “But wasn’t the maze sequence longer?”.

As hard as I would have liked to try, except for the intense climax (an integral twist of which I had conveniently forgotten… to my respite let me add), I couldn’t view it as a first timer. The fact that Goblet of Fire is such a pure action-and-plot oriented enterprise (probably the most in the series) with little attention to characters which had been fleshed out to their max by and till Prisoner of Azkaban, and as I said earlier, the film being such a wonderful adaptation (read translation), didn’t help the cause at all.

So in a way I was envious of all those who had discovered Potter just through the big screen and just sat there going through, I bet, one hell of a joyride. Of course, I have been consoling myself since I came out of the cinema, by remembering those nail-biting 6 or so hours in which I had raced through the book and been through all those motions in the silence of the room. In a way, that kind of un-manipulated thrill can never be competed by the audio-visual manipulation of a movie and also the fact that one is at the mercy of someone else’s vision throughout cannot just be shrugged off.

And thus, with all my justifications which have consoled me to the point where I can stop wincing, stop moaning and start concentrating on what I had come here to write about, let me review the film.

First, the performances. As the exceedingly photogenic and undoubtedly talented trio, Radcliffe, Grint and Watson turn in sparkling performances with not a twitch of confused acting. Thoroughbreds now that they are, this being their fifth year acting in this enterprise, they’ve evidently given every shot of theirs, the very best and have made Harry, Ron and Hermoine as adorable and lively as Rowling’s characters could be. Being not a character oriented film at all, evil regulars like Alan Rickman (Snape) and Tom Felton (Draco) have next to no role here but with the Great Lord Voldemort himself (Ralph Fiennes fiendishly and deliciously playing to the gallery) making his presence, I doubt if you’d care. James and Oliver Phelps are awesome as the ruffly cocky Weasley brothers; then there’s Miranda Richardson who makes the character of Rita Skeeter even bitchier, there’s Jeff Rawle whose cries for his dead son towards the finale stay with you long after the scene’s gone, there’s Brendan Gleeson whose Mad Eye Moody is fabulously over-the-top and finally there’s Stainslav M as the enigmatic Victor Krum who couldn’t be more suitably cast. Michael Gambon, though, as Dumbledore is perhaps a bit too animated sometimes.

The screenplay is a terrific image of the book, and for maximum effect, the flab (ie. Hermoine, her concern for house-elves and her SPEW plus the actual match of the Quidditch World Cup) is completely gotten rid of– to focus solely on the daddy of all the events in the series–the Triwizard Tournament. And though the tasks are shorter and snappier than a purist like me would have liked, the thrill factor is kept high. One thing for which this film would always remain ingrained is the finale—the thrill and the shock value isn’t dampened by any unnecessary editing. The length, the twists and the actual sequence is just right.

The canvas is huuuuuge. CGi splendid. Camerawork exquisite. Which means that sequences like the Dark Mark being conjured, the fire-breathing dragon chasing Harry on the broom, the Merpeople dragging him down with their tentacles and Voldemort emerging from a boiling cauldron are a treat for the senses. The sound design, though functional, could definitely have done with more background score in both action and dialogue sequences. Maybe this was deliberate, but in more than one sequence I felt my eyes were having more fun than my ears. Also, one tends to miss the moving staircases, the talking portraits and strangely enough The Great Hall is deceptively small. There are no special filters used by the look of it, and the film’s canvas carries on the unforgivingly gritty and rough look from Prisoner of Azkaban. Dialogues are fantastic and the humour, tastefully nuanced.

All in all, a remarkable film where my own movie-watching experience was spoiled by being a compulsive reader. But I am sure I am not the only one.

PS: Big thumbs up to Mike Newell. I so badly wish he was directing the sinister and cerebral next one too.