Fannish Heretic Strikes Again
Jun. 6th, 2004 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleI will not join the love-in. I am annoyed and disappointed. Now don't get me wrong, there are a lot of really good things about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, not least of which is the way that Hermione says, "Ronald," in that way that teenage girls call the people they love by their full names. The Knight Bus is hilarious, and the Weasley family around the table at the Leaky Cauldron is everything I could hope for them to be. Michael Gambon is a better Dumbledore than Richard Harris ever was, and Emma Thompson does for Trelawney what Kenneth Branagh did for Lockhart. I love the way we see Snape and Draco so much more clearly in this one. We see Snape's drive to protect Harry, both in shielding him from Lupin and earlier, when he asks if they ought to tell Harry about Sirius. We see Draco's true cowardice if not quite the same level of planned malice that I remember from the book. These are all good things about the movie, but they're fairly small good things, and this movie has some very big things wrong with it.
Alfonso Cuarón and Steven Kloves cut way too many corners. In fan fiction, it's okay to take shortcuts. That's the whole point; you don't have to spend thirty pages introducing your characters and their world because your audience already knows. When you're making a movie--creating source material--even if it's in a universe as well known as Harry Potter, you can't take those shortcuts. This is the whole reason that the X-Men movies have been dumbed down into such simple versions of the real stories. Of course, you have to cut something to turn a 435-page book into a two and a half hour movie, but you can't cut some of what they cut without losing a lot of meaning. We lost all explanation of the Marauders, and that means we lost a lot. We're never told why Lupin knows about the map or what the names mean. We never hear about Harry's father being an Animagus and how that relates to his Patronus. How much sense is Lupin's whole involvement with the map going to make to someone who hasn't read the book? It's not as if they couldn't find time for a little explanation; I spent several scenes wishing for a fast forward button and would have gladly traded extended spinning in and out of the atmosphere for some explanation.
The final shot of the movie, Harry alone with blurred edges, is a perfect metaphor for the second big problem with the movie. This one is all about Harry, and everyone else is just a blurred figure on the edge. Yes, I get that he's the main character, but he's not there in some kind of vacuum, and I was horribly disappointed by how little we really saw of the rest of the world. Ron and Hermione come off best, simply by virtue of being there the most. We get to see their developing relationship a bit, but Ron seems stuck in some kind of I'm just here because I'm supposed to be in this scene but I don't actually get to do much or be much of a real person hell, and Hermione is just a teenage girl ("Is that really how my hair looks from the back?") who bears too little resemblance to everyone's favorite school-obsessed witch. The rest of the school, too, seems too much like some kind of backdrop/deus ex machina and too little like a bunch of other lives that intersect with Harry's. What I look for in a story is the interaction between characters, and with the exception of some of Harry's moments with Ron, Hermione, and Lupin, and Ron and Hermione's moments of togetherness, I felt that the movie was sorely lacking in human connections.
Alfonso Cuarón and Steven Kloves cut way too many corners. In fan fiction, it's okay to take shortcuts. That's the whole point; you don't have to spend thirty pages introducing your characters and their world because your audience already knows. When you're making a movie--creating source material--even if it's in a universe as well known as Harry Potter, you can't take those shortcuts. This is the whole reason that the X-Men movies have been dumbed down into such simple versions of the real stories. Of course, you have to cut something to turn a 435-page book into a two and a half hour movie, but you can't cut some of what they cut without losing a lot of meaning. We lost all explanation of the Marauders, and that means we lost a lot. We're never told why Lupin knows about the map or what the names mean. We never hear about Harry's father being an Animagus and how that relates to his Patronus. How much sense is Lupin's whole involvement with the map going to make to someone who hasn't read the book? It's not as if they couldn't find time for a little explanation; I spent several scenes wishing for a fast forward button and would have gladly traded extended spinning in and out of the atmosphere for some explanation.
The final shot of the movie, Harry alone with blurred edges, is a perfect metaphor for the second big problem with the movie. This one is all about Harry, and everyone else is just a blurred figure on the edge. Yes, I get that he's the main character, but he's not there in some kind of vacuum, and I was horribly disappointed by how little we really saw of the rest of the world. Ron and Hermione come off best, simply by virtue of being there the most. We get to see their developing relationship a bit, but Ron seems stuck in some kind of I'm just here because I'm supposed to be in this scene but I don't actually get to do much or be much of a real person hell, and Hermione is just a teenage girl ("Is that really how my hair looks from the back?") who bears too little resemblance to everyone's favorite school-obsessed witch. The rest of the school, too, seems too much like some kind of backdrop/deus ex machina and too little like a bunch of other lives that intersect with Harry's. What I look for in a story is the interaction between characters, and with the exception of some of Harry's moments with Ron, Hermione, and Lupin, and Ron and Hermione's moments of togetherness, I felt that the movie was sorely lacking in human connections.