Spring Break
Fantastic Fifth: Harry Potter and the Hogwarts team bring Rowling's magic to silver screen
By: Esther Sutton
Issue date: 7/10/07 Section: News
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Going into a movie theatre to see the newest installment in what has become a pop culture phenomenon, one gets the feeling that he or she has entered the lair of one of America's loudest, most dedicated and most obnoxious subcultures. People in wizard hats casting faux-spells on fellow Potter-enthusiasts abound. Then there is the film itself.
Audiences might expect the fifth of the seven-part series be full of uptight British actors delivering uptight British dialogue in beautiful settings and magical places previously hidden between sheets of paper on bookshelves. The characters will come alive, but will be utterly disappointing to any fans of the books. However, when the theater-goer watches "Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix," all of these expectations will be cast away.
In the film, the famous series takes a noticeable turn. Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), fresh from his face-to-face meeting with Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), can't quite understand why no one - save his best friends - believes his story about the evil wizard's return, and turns into an emotional loner and a pathetic outcast, not hard to understand when the Ministry of Magic itself has made every effort to prove that he is barking mad and full of lies. Harry - ever the fighter - uses his hard-earned experience fighting the Dark Arts to teach his fellow classmates how to fight and defend themselves in the approaching war between good and evil. Against him are a passel of wicked witches and wizards, including the jolly pink toad Delores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), the ever-slimy Lucius Malfoy (Jason Isaacs), and of course, the Dark Lord himself.
The film utilizes every overused dichotomy possible - the dark and light "angels" fighting for the good and bad sides respectively, water against fire, death against life, with a few cheesy power lines such as "We've got something to fight for" thrown in here and there to wash it all down. While the Harry from the book seems at times melodramatic and downright unlikeable, the flaws of Radcliffe's Harry bring a heroic air to his presence in the film. Gone is the Harry with a scratched forehead and mixed-up identity. As the characters take on challenges and interact with each other, the line separating good and evil becomes stronger, and the audience becomes emotionally wrapped up in the outcome, which will not be revealed until the end of the seventh film, a few years down the road. However, with the fifth film safely tucked up under our belts, the end seems deliciously near.
Above all, the film meets its goal - to entertain. The producers took J.K. Rowling's lengthy and at times confusing story and ran with it, giving us a beautiful film with a solid beginning and ending that frankly puts the previous four to shame. Though the story ends on a difficult note, the audience sat on the edge of its collective seat for the entire 128 minutes, and even if there were something to complain about, the long-awaited battle between Dumbledore - the ultimate good wizard - and Voldemort - the ultimate asshole - is well worth it.
From scene to scene, everything else becomes unimportant; the film sucks you in with its mystery - about as much as the book does - and doesn't let you go.
It's one of those rare movies that make you want to believe in things that simply cannot be real. It is a difficult task to acclimate any book to a film, and where the others have let us down, this one gets a swish and flick - of my "Whoop" that is.
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