Review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) by Shanes — 19 Jul 2007

Books are not films, of course, and that's why films should always take liberties with the source material. I've never been one to deny it. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is an example of a film that acted as an interpretation and not a flat-out cut-and-paste to screen.

The latter is lazy film making. This fifth Harry Potter was rife with choices, but most of them were poor choices. Characters are left underdeveloped, suspense is nowhere and--as opposed to, say, Prisoner of Azkaban--it lacks imagination and the visual verve that should define the series.

One might gather that the film's largely expository parts act solely as necessary buildups to some climax and they never act on their own. A film should never, ever, be about the payoff: everything in-between matters just as much as the fireworks finish.

And Rowling has a fundamental difficulty with her imagination that I cannot ignore and that I have long wanted to point out. She only plays at knowing her world, but when she hits a creative wall, she inserts some magnificent and magical plot device to move along the action and stir some tension.

By that method, she leeches and manipulates us all into believing her world. She did it in Goblet of Fire with the triwizard tournament. Somehow a large maze appeared and there were other massive geographical elements that had heretofore been absent.

To me, that's inept storytelling and, in fact, it cheats not only her readers, but her otherwise imaginative self. Now I can understand to an extent because people often rush her creative process along, but the effect is diminished by it and the story's credibility disintegrates evermore because of it.

In Order of the Phoenix she added "the Room of Requirement," which I'll refrain from explaining in the interest of people who have yet to see the film--just take my word for it. But most importantly, the characters needed some development to make the themes more potent.

The book exceeded 800 pages and clearly that complicates matters. A solution would be to break the film into two parts and release them separately. Ironically, the fifth book was my favorite in the series thus far (the seventh to be completed soon), but the adaptation was my least favorite of all.