| I saw PoA! |
[Jun. 12th, 2004|06:01 pm] |
I saw Prisoner of Azkaban the other day. Tis good, though they left half the stuff out! Where is Crookshanks, chasing Scabbers everywhere, pressing the knot on the Whomping Willow? What happened to Remus telling Harry that, in fact, he is Moony, and Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs are in fact Peter, Sirius and James? Where did Pigwidgeon disappear to? And why are the Dementors flying?
Anyways, rant over, and it was for all its faults a very very good film. Buckbeak was fantastic (I have an unhealthy Hagrid-esque obsession with all things weird), and I loved the sequence where he flew Harry over the lake. Wish I was there and all that. :) They put more emphasis on the whole thing about going back and changing the past, what with the stones and the howling and everything. The final Patronus was good, too, although I had been hoping to see Prongs. Oh, and the Maurauder's Map was brilliant!
I have a theory about the Map. If it showed everybody in Hogwarts at any given time, given the population of the place, there wouldn't be room for everybody. So I think it shows major people like Dumbledore all the time, and then if you're looking for someone or they're important in some way (for example if Harry hadn't seen Snape on the Map, he wouldn't have had a chance to wipe it and Snape would have found it, maybe recognised it. Has Snape seen it before, when he and James etc were at Hogwarts together?) they appear. Speaking of the Map, Fred and George finally get to live up to their reputation as jokers and mischief makers. Just in a little way, when they give Harry the Map, but I enjoyed it all the same.
Lupin was cool. Remus as a werewolf was... well, it was good, though lightyears from how I imagined it. I always pictured him as more "evil wolf" than "furry human". But I guess they had to do him like that if they were going to do the whole Gollum-esque motion-capture thing. Did they do that for the werewolf? I'm sure I read that they did that somewhere. But I find it a bit implausable when he goes after back-in-time Harry and Hermione. Not the fact that he went after them (he was a transformed werewolf, it's in his job description), but the fact that he was literally about a metre away and he couldn't find them when they were panting behind a tree. It's like the raptors in the kitchen in the first Jurassic Park movie. "I can hear 'em, and I can smell 'em, but I can't see 'em so I can't catch 'em".
I have a problem with the way the Dementors and Sirius as a dog were done. The Dementors flying, for one thing. It never says they could fly, although I'm not sure if it said they couldn't. And the way they gave the Kiss was light-years from the book. They didn't even touch Sirius or Harry, and yet Sirius' soul started floating out of his mouth! And WHY exactly did that one on the train start to Kiss Harry, assuming that that face-sucking thing is Kissing? That is simply a Thing Not Done. That is worse than "Arwen's Life Is Tied To The Fate Of The Ring". *Thinks about Alintttfotr* Possibly. And to tackle the problem of our first glance of Sirius. Why o why is he snarling at Harry? Of all the things to do upon seeing your godchild for the first time in fourteen years, snarling and barking threateningly is not top of my list. And at the Quidditch match (the only one of the film incidentally, which I'll bet Wood wasn't happy about. No more Gryffindor Quidditch Cup. No Patronusing Malfoy... *cries*), what is he doing up in the clouds? As a cloud? Speaking of which, the Dementors lock onto Harry and singlemindedly persue him through the air, even going so far as to try to Kiss him as he fall from his broom! Now, we are going into Eye-quake territory here.
This seems to have turned into a rant. Oh, dear. I make it sound like a very bad film, don’t I? It’s probably because I am comparing it to the book so much. As a film on its own, with no peers breathing down its throat, it is a brilliant film, undoubtedly the best so far.
Now, who’s up for Goblet of Fire? :) |
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