Review of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

The following is by Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen:

The fourth Harry Potter film is sensitive, scary and mostly satisfying. The film remains basically true to the book, with several unimportant omissions and a few small plot changes obviously made to allow a 734-page book to become a two-and-a-half-hour movie.

The actors continue to get better with each film. Thanks to their growing skills, and some excellent direction, this movie is the best so far at conveying some of the complicated undertones of its accompanying book. In this case, these have to do with the encroaching adolescence of Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione. The movie does a deft job showing how complicated, exciting and downright humiliating the first teenage years can be. In the scenes on this topic, it is poignant and very funny.

Additionally, the movie subtly, beautifully illustrates Harry’s growing sense of separation from his peers — his feeling that he is cursed never to enjoy the simple pleasures that they take for granted.

This is the most frightening of the movies thus far, which is fitting as the fourth book was significantly “darker” than those which came before it. Several of the scenes caused even this adult — who knew what happened next — to squirm a bit.

My one big complaint about the film is that the filmmakers seem to have made a very conscious effort not to hew too closely to the book. In some ways this is good. But, since Goblet of Fire is my favorite Harry Potter book, it was also somewhat of a letdown. There are certain lines, certain scenes, that stand out in the book as special. Often, watching the movie, the appropriate line of dialogue from the book would run through my head just before a character should have spoken the line onscreen. But the “right” words never came. Every time, the line was either altered or omitted entirely. Additionally, my favorite scene in the book, and probably of the whole series, did not appear in the film at all (I’ll leave the details of this out, for the sake of those who haven’t seen the movie).

I understand that the filmmakers did not set out to make a Jill-personalized film and that they cannot include all my favorite tidbits. However, I imagine that some of my favorites are also the favorites of many other millions of people. A few direct quotations from the book would have made us feel oh-so-special.

All in all, I definitely recommend this film if you are a Harry Potter fan. And if you are not a Harry Potter fan….then what the heck are you thinking?