The Goblet of Fire

To celebrate the end of this strenuous week (when i felt someone had performed the Cruciatus curse on me..), i went to watch the new Harry Potter release.. The Goblet of Fire..

Obviously, i am an ardent Harry Potter fan and have read all the books and seen all the movies to date.. and i am thoroughly impressed with the plot.. can discuss at length about the story any time of the day...

let us discuss the movie from the perspective of the book.. firstly, considering that the book was more than 600 pages long, it was definitely going to be a challenge to accomodate all the details of the book... that would have atleast required two films of the same length!

so the changes from the story as written by JKR start from the first chapter itself.. there we see Crouch Jr. along with Peter Pettigrew and Lord Voldemort which was not the case in the book.. then the movie also saves on adding three more characters by completely ignoring the Dursleys.. it would have been real fun with Dudley eating one of those magical toffees by Fred and George...

There is further just a fleeting mention of the Quidditch world cup and not even a single goal is shown.. but i had expected it to be very brief anyways..

The movie starts to run at a rapid pace with the introduction of Cho Chang in the train to Hogwarts.. a very cute character... soon the other two magical schools are quickly introduced and the triwizard tournament is explained.. surprisingly Beauxbatons has only girl students which was not the case in the book... the introduction of the goblet of fire is also fast-paced as expected..

one of the flaws in the movie was that the shock at the moment when harry's name pops out of the goblet of fire was way too little.. that should have been a much stronger scene.. also while reading the book, i had imagined that sirius would be visible in the fire but that was hardly the case in the movie..

only the class of Mad-Eye Moody was shown and some parts of Snape's classes but otherwise, the movie only focussed on the three tasks and the Yule ball.. the playing of rock music at the Yule ball was really a pathetic idea..

the depiction of the first task was awesome.. however, the third task showed a lot of inconsistencies and many details such as the questions that harry answers were missing.. it seemed as if the director was in a hurry to finish the film..

However, Lord Voldemort's depiction was really good and the duel of harry and voldemort was interesting.. but the final scene of Rita Skeeter being caught by hermione should have been included..

in short, the movie was a good attempt to keep up with the story but it understandably failed to be completely consistent... the choice of characters seemed good (though i had imagined Viktor Krum to be a leaner guy when i read the book).. Hermione (Emma Watson) was gorgeous at the Yule Ball and she is getting really beautiful! The pic here is one of the best and most enchanting pic I have ever seen.. she is no less good-looking than a Veela! The smirk on her face in this pic makes her look all the more beautiful.. and I can only imagine how much more beautiful she would be in the next film...

Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and Ron (Rupert Grynt) performed well.. the characters of Cho and Fleur also rated above average on the beauty-meter..

think that has been quite a good description of the film... need to get back to studies as there is still one more endsem to deal with..:-)