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blue yellow black by Ira Joel Haber 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Harry Potter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the Order of the Phoenix

 

 

 

 

Warning: spoilers for both the movie and Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows

 

As a fan of both the books and the movies, I will have to admit that the latest installment of the wizarding series in movie form is an incredibly delightful film.  Even though it aims to be darker than the others up to this point, the characters and the special features have combined to make it like stepping into an amazing world filled with sorrow, yes, but also with an extreme sense of hope and joy.

 

However, despite my love of how the movie managed to temporarily remove me from the boring humdrum of my daily existence, I still found that there were parts of it that I had wished were different.  I know that the book was an extremely large edition, so several things had to be left out, but that didn’t mean that they had to change part of the plot as well. 

 

For example, in the movie, it was Cho that turned Dumbledore’s Army over to Umbridge, doing so under the duress of a potion that forces people to speak the truth.  However, in the book, it was Cho’s friend who betrayed the group, and they only found out who it was because Hermione had jinxed it so that the person who told on them would have the word Sneak spelled out across their face in pimples.  This version, I think, would have been a far better one than what finally ended up in the film. 

 

Another thing that confused me about the movie was the fact that they introduced the house elf, Kreacher, but failed to follow through with his betrayal of the Order of the Phoenix that ultimately ends in the death of his master, Sirius.  We see that Kreacher is in the house, and we see that he goes around talking to himself, but the way in which he sacrificed the order to Bellatrix and Narcissa, was not at all explained, making him seem an odd apparition.  If they were going to leave out this important role that Kreacher plays, then they might as well have put in the scenes with Dobby instead. 

 

Also, the scene where Harry, Ron, and Hermione find the strange locket with an S on its cover is omitted from the film.  This scene will prove important in the latter movies and books as the locket turns out to be one of Lord Voldemort’s Horcruxes. 

 

I know and understand the complexity and difficulty that is the business of taking a work of fiction and trying to turn it into a screenplay that will successfully incorporate so many of the elements that makes the book special and I have not really complained in earlier Harry Potter films when this was done.  This time, though, I felt that the lacking or incorrect information was potentially problematic in later films and that in some parts it could have even detracted a little from the story itself.

 

Oh, but what do I know?  My little words probably mean nothing in the face of the billions of dollars that the Harry Potter franchise has brought in over the years.  I’m just a girl who likes to watch movies in the dark and pretend that the rest of the world has fallen away.  And if that was the sole aim of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, then it definitely succeeded in pulling me away for a solid two and a half hours.