When I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire I didn’t really know what it was that bothered me. And then it hit me…
The tittle of this post spawned from an admission on the part of the producers about the thought process behind the development of the script: “The book is so long that we could never develop all stories, so we only concentrate on Harry“. Yes, it is a standard practice by movie script writers to compress a book, but in this case I feel they dropped the ball, and like a boy in puberty all things seem to not matter but the main character, a totally egocentric universe. There were too many stories untold, too many holes in the script. It felt unfinished. Imagine if they did the same to the Lod of the Rings and followed only one story line! Oh, the horor!
Also, this is the film where Harry is first shown to be attracted to a girl and we all remember how that felt when we hit puberty. It was done in a funny but not crude way, but yet again, the book had so much more depth to this aspect of the three leading characters’ lives.
That said, it wasn’t a bad movie. The special effects were amazing, better than ever before. I especially enjoyed the dragon sequence (although it brought back too many memories from Reign of Fire – not that this is a bad thing, I actually enjoyed this movie, I just feel that Goblet of Fire was… borrowing too many stuff from those dragons) and the introduction of other schools of magic (the entrance of the two schools in the main hall of Hogwarts was a very nice sequence – even if the French were a bit too… overt).
All in all I would say that I rank this on the same level as Chamber of Secrets with my all time favourite still being The Prisoner of Azkaban.
Well personall I’d rank it as high as the prisoner of azkaban, mainly due to the fast action and more “mature” feel than the other movies. Good thing you reminded me about Reign of Fire though, haven’t seen that movie yet… need to get around to seeing it!
Now if only I could find a legal way of obtaining the movie so I could post here saying “I will see it today” without risk of being spammed to death by movie licensing e-mails…
Much of the allure of Reign of Fire (henceforth, RoF) was the never-before-seen-like-that-dragons it had. The creators of that movie were true pioneers in dragon design/display. All their inspiration came from science, not from another movie, working on the axiom that dragons existed as animals (hence they had nothing magical about them) and letting everything else come from that.
Ever since those guys, there have been some dragons in movies and, not surprisingly, they all copied RoF. What I’m getting at is that maybe people that haven’t seen RoF but have seen dragons in the last three years in movies will not be so taken with the dragons in RoF. So try to remember that it was RoF you owe your thanks for that nice Harry Potter dragon sequence.