Last night, along with the 10 other people in Boston who hadn’t seen the latest Harry Potter movie, I trundled down to the Fenway 13 for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I did enjoy the fact that I was saving myself days of effort by not having to read the book, but otherwise I can’t understand why anyone went to this movie or read the underlying book. The entire movie is about some sort of high-school wizard competition, that is wholly unnecessary and apparently rather risky. I could understand why someone in, say, Springfield Public High School, would care about their team and the Big Game with Shelbyville. But in general people don’t get excited about high school sports that aren’t at their own school. Why do people think that this is a worthy successor to the preceding Harry Potter books and movies?
8 thoughts on “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”
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The movie was OK, the book, as always, is much better. Certainly worth a read as much as any other HP book. The movie is an extremely compressed take on the book. More so than any of the previous movies.
Potter books tend to be more about characters and interesting situations than plot. The underlying plot resolution is always a little stupid and this one was stupider than most. The bad guys want Harry Potter to touch a PortKey, which can look like anything. Why go to all the trouble of getting Harry to enter and win a tournament to accomplish that end? Potter receives random anonymous gifts all the time – broomsticks, invisibility cloaks – so why not giftwrap the PortKey and leave it on his bed or in his trunk? Or have the fake Moody hand it to him after class?
It’s like: suppose you wanted to kill a football player – naturally you’d do so by rigging all the games his team enters so he wins the superbowl so he can put on a superbowl ring that you’ve previously poisoned. Or if you wanted to kill an actor – naturally you’d rig it so he won a booby-trapped academy award!
The book was better because it had decent character development and other things going on /besides/ the tournament, most of which got cut to make it filmable.
You wrote: “I can’t understand why anyone went to this movie or read the underlying book”
I am assuming most people went to see it for the same reason you did, maybe for one or more of the following reasons:
– they think they will enjoy it
– they cannot think of anything better to do
– they want to part of the latest hype and trend
– they are a movie critic
– it’s part of a school assignment
– they are reviewing it to determine if it is appropriate for their kids to see
– their friend works at the theater and snuck them in
– they couldn’t convince their friends to see King Kong instead
– they have movie gift certificate that expire soon and they’ve seen everything else
– they want something to write about in their BLOG
You would think that anyone familiar with the traditional British “boys at public school” genre or even Rupert the Bear annuals would recognize HP for what it was.
Having not read the book and not seen the movie, the Mr. Spock answer would be that while the Port Key can be anything, the creator may not have that much control over what it looks like. It came out as this trophy thing and so they needed this elaborate setup.
Doesn’t make it more interesting though and I have no intention of finding out for myself.
The books are well worth reading, but this movie, more than the others, made no sense to those who had not read the books. “The Goblet of Fire” had more plot holes than the other 5 books in the series because Rowling was writing to a deadline; in the movie, some of those plot holes were actually repaired, but if the movie had been only 15 minutes longer the rest could have been too — a big missed opportunity.
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I think the fourth book is the best of the series so far (incl. 5 and 6). I didn’t especially like any of the movies except the third (Prisoner of Azkaban), which was actually a good movie.
It’s not really about the plot, it’s about the characters and events that happen on the way and the way it’s described. The plot has a lot of theatrical things that don’t “make sense” in a adult conservative sort of way. I don’t see why a novel (aimed for children and like minded) about an imaginary world has to make complete sense to be good. If everything makes perfect sense then it’s no longer an interesting imaginary world – it’s too close to a regular book where you can guess the ending etc. Rowling succeeds by being a fluent writer and the little things that don’t make sense are a part of what makes the wizarding world personal and a world of its own, with its own characteristics that don’t make sense to people in the regular muggle world. We have absurd traditions too, and people do strange things which can only be understood by living in the world long enough and reading some history. Baseball for example, it’s wholly unnecessary and nothing happens most of the time, with players just standing there and certainly nothing that would be understandable for someone coming from another culture. The Potter world has its own idiosyncracies, and that’s the spice that makes the meal special.