Harry Potter and the Goblet of Decently Warm Embers

It's rested a few days now since I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire which puts me still five times behind one of my students, I think. I'm guessing that five days of wait time is enough for me to drop a decent review. So, here goes...

The movie's good. It's not great, but it's good. Let's get that out of the way right off the bat.

The first two films in the series were honest, truthful, soulless adaptations of the books. The third film, then, took the feeling of the books - the joy and excitement, played a little looser with the details, and turned them into a great movie. The Goblet of Fire ends up partway between the two extremes. In this film, the writers and directors have taken a 700+-page book and eliminated many of the storylines that makes for a rich, exciting, deep, wonderful book and streamlined it into a reasonably tight two-and-a-half-hour film.

The film is so tight, in fact, that the events in the film roll one into the other without much in the way of the quiet moments that make so many great films. The events of the Triwizard Cup are beautifully filmed, really well coreographed, and nicely adapted. And they fit together like Lego blocks - each one expertly made, each one very well locked into the next, but there isn't a lick of space or air between them.

Instead of the quiet moments of character development that we have throughout the book - filled with subplots like SPEW and the vela - we get well done events but not much connecting them. Instead of the long stretches between trials in which the competitors had to do research, we have trials running into the next trial.

It's a good film, it really is. But it lacks the spirit of a great film. If you've read the books, you'll see this film and the next two when the arrive to us. If we're lucky, we'll get another Prisoner of Azkaban.