Harry Potter & The Order of Pheonix

The new Harry Potter movie opens today, or for hardcore fans, last night at midnight. Seriously here in my town people were lined up for ten hours. On the news they showed all these nerds people running around in capes with their lawn chairs and coolers in front of the theater. How embarrassing.

Our friend and ex smack talking girl Audrey was able to catch the movie before most people, since she lives in the Phillipines, and was nice enough to write up this review for us, so check it out!

This is the 5th movie installment of the series Harry Potter. For those who are not avid readers of the book, Order of the Phoenix is the longest (and confirmed to be the longest) out of the 6 so far and also one of the darkest in storyline, so I was really anxious to see how they’d condensed this into a movie. Just a side note, the Harry Potter movies have been improving probably due to the maturity of the plot or maybe having more experience in acting for the characters.

So I catch the earliest showing of the movie that I can manage – we get it earlier here because of the time zones and maybe for some movies like Transformers, primarily to fight against the massive piracy predominant over here. They were already pre-selling tickets prior to the release and early morning show times (this was at 9 a.m.) to handle the influx of movie watchers pretty much like the previous movies. Now on with the review:

In a nutshell, the movie left me scratching my head. At best, it can be described as weird. Book 5 wasn’t really the best book of the series so far but the story was definitely among the more important ones. It was dark, yes, but it did not necessarily mean that the entire movie had to be dark. The characterization of the protagonists was so bad (i.e. Tonks, Luna and Grawp) there wasn’t really much to begin with. They did highlight the more important points in the story but the piecing together was not successful. Further, they made some changes to the storyline which was not only unnecessary; at times it was even cheesy.

If there were some good things about the movie, it’s probably the choice of antagonists like Umbridge and Beatrix Lestrange – you will definitely hate them (so much so that from now on, I won’t wear much pink). There are some scenes from the previous movies that would make you realize how the characters we’ve got accustomed to have grown in each movie. Finally, the most action filled part of the film which was towards the end of the movie (NOT the Voldemort versus Dumbledore) scene was passable.

So yes, Order of the Phoenix is indeed dark, so much so that the lighter scenes were too short lived. It has the same caliber as the second film, with lesser magic and more darkness. I hardly think kids would even enjoy watching this because of its dark nature. Did I mention it was dark?

I give it 2.5 out of 5 stars. I am so looking forward to the last book now to fill my Harry Potter enthusiasm. There are some rumors that the fifth Harry Potter movie is probably the last, I wonder why.

An almost 100% dark movie? That actually sounds good to me. I wonder if I could understand this without watching the first four movies or reading any of the books, hmm….

Thanks Audrey!