Did they make sense, or were you occasionally left wondering, WTF?
I haven’t seen the new movie, but was reading the thread and it got me thinking about this. In the past I’d wondered, because ISTM that many parts of the movies jump around without proper explanation.
The Shrieking Shack scene of Prisoner of Azkaban is the only example that comes to mind. It was that scene that originally made me wonder, because it’s so short in the movie, but in the book much longer, and with a lot more explanation. The first 2 books are so much shorter, they didn’t have to cut so much detail or make so many changes, from what I can remember. PoA, GoF, and OotP are much longer and require so much more tweaking to fit into a reasonable length of time.
So, do any non-Harry Potter readers have difficulty following parts of the movies?
[Also, apologies for yet another HP thread, but didn’t want to hijack the other ones]
I can’t really think of any real moments of confusion, but I always saw them with big fans of the books. Also, having read a good amount of fantasy myself, and being and warhammer and video game nerd, I was pretty well prepared for most of the concepts presented.
I hadn’t read any of the books until after seeing the first three movies. I remember being a bit confused about the rules of Quiddich after the first movie. “Why do they go through all this trouble scoring goals if whoever catches the snitch wins the game?” (In the movie Wood actually says, “You catch this, we win,” which added to my confusion.)
After seeing the third movie I was a bit puzzled by where the map came from (it didn’t help that I thought they said “Mrs. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs”), and also why the white stag appeared when Harry used the Patronus charm.
To anyone who’s wondering, the answers are:
[ul][li]You get 150 points and end the game by catching the snitch, but you would still lose if you were behind by more than 150.[/li][li]“Messrs Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs” are Remus Lupin, Peter Pettigrew, Sirius Black, and James Potter, respectively, who created the map when they were students. The names describe their animagus forms (or in Moony’s case, the fact that he’s a werewolf).[/li][li]Full-fledged patronuses (patroni?) always take on animal form. Harry’s is a stag because that was his father’s animagus form.[/ul][/li]
I also remember thinking that I would have been confused as hell by “priori incantatem” in Goblet of Fire if I hadn’t read the book first.
I haven’t (yet) read the books. I’ve gone and done some independant research on them, however!
I found all of the movies up to 5 to be fairly easy to follow. Goblet of Fire got confusing, and parts of OOtP did as well. Everyone kept talking about Tonks in reviews and I had no idea how I missed this character. I think in the movie you never hear anyone call her Tonks; Mad Eye calls her Nyphadora at the beginning. I felt that OOtP assumed you already knew a lot of the story (Neville’s family, etc.) and characters. The characters I had the most trouble with in OOtP because I saw it in the theater, and people were clapping and cheering when their favorites came onscreen. Hard to catch their names with the accents and noise!
I do plan to read them, and nonetheless thoroughly enjoyed the movies.
I, as a rule, never see a movie of a book I was planning on reading until I read it first. I’m not a Harry Potter fanboy, but I did greatly enjoy Prisoner of Azkaban (so much that it’s the most recent book I read in one day), and still consider it about 500x better than the rest of the series. But when I saw the movie, I was taken back on things that weren’t explained, and felt bad for people seeing the movie who never got to read the book. The shack and the map were two things that made me think “well I know the deal with those, but how confused are the newcomers going to be?” I also recall that the movie doesn’t go nearly into as much detail about just how gruesome Azkaban is.
I’ve seen the first 4 films and never read the books. The first two were easy enough to follow but Prisoner of Azkaban got fairly confusing near the end. I’ve seen it a couple times since and with some questions answered by book reading friends it sort of fell into place.
Goblet of Fire was good but I questioned a lot where crowds of people just seemed to run off to or were forgotten about. Harry’s fighting a dragon and flies off with it chasing him and the crowd just sort of hangs out until he comes back or not? The quidich world championship is going on with thousands of fans (presumably magic folk) and they’re all chased off by a handful of bad guys??
The final stage of the Goblet of Fire competition is in the maze but there’s only a handful of spectators? Meanwhile Harry gets transported to some odd place to confront Voldemort and no one seems to notice he’s missing.
The movies also don’t do a very good job of explaining how the magic world is seperated from the muggle world and how they co-exsist or keep under wraps.
I just borrowed the set of books from my MotherInLaw and am 10 pages into the first (hmm… never knew Mr. Dursley worked for a drill company). I’m a slow reader but plan to get through them all.
It’s been awhile since I read book four all the way through (just started it again yesterday) but here’s the short version.
Harry and Voldemort’s wands both contain phoenix feathers from the same phoenix, namely Fawkes, Dumbledore’s pet. When two ‘brother’ wands are forced to battle each other, it forces one of the wands to start spitting out the spells that it last performed. Since Voldemort had last used his wand to kill Cedric, the old gardner, and Harry’s parents, their forms are what came out of the wand.
Nah. I’m cool with it. I’ve enjoyed the Harry Potter movies, and despite changing directors, they’ve had a nice sense of contiunuity, even though the tone has changed.
Additionally, I don’t plan on reading th ebooks.
That is the basics of it. There are actually two ways of getting that effect, one is the ‘brother’ wands being forced to fight method. The other is by casting the spell Priori Incantatum on a single wand. This spell was used after the mayhem at the World Cup to determine that Harry’s wand was used to conjure the dark mark.
With all due respect to those who absorb every single detail of the books, the movies aren’t really all that hard to follow. They’ve all basically introduced “Big Thing That Shall Be Dealt With At The End”, and then wound their way there through various plot twists, none of which are essential to understanding what’s happening big picture-wise.
It’s not a matter of not understanding.
It’s just a matter of not having the full tapestry that readers have.
I understand your point for the most part, not knowing certain details won’t detract from the movies or make them hard to follow.
But some Big Things were skipped over or barely mentioned. The Shrieking Shack scene, for instance. In the book, you have like 2 chapters devoted to explaining why Sirius is innocent, and each objection to the theory is dealt with individually and completely. The readers slowly come to the realization, along with Harry & co., that Sirius didn’t betray the Potters.
In the movie, the scene’s only 5 or 10 minutes, and seemed (to me) so disjointed and confusing that I wondered if people who hadn’t read the books had trouble following it. They condense what was probably 100 lines of dialogue into 20, don’t go into detail at all, and as someone who knew what was going to happen I still said, WTF? at the end of that scene.
Maybe, but like I said. . .it was enough to get that he didn’t betray the Potters without getting the full picture.
I don’t know the movies well enough to really comment further. I’ve seen, and liked, them all, but I really just enjoy them as disposable, plot-driven, eye-candy with good characters. I don’t mean any part of “disposable, plot-driven, eye-candy” to offend. That’s exactly what some movies should be, and HP does it better than most. I just don’t buy into the entire mythologizing of them.
[spoiler]The map is the map that Fred and George give Harry. It was created by Harry’s father, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew when they were in school together. The shack refers to the Shrieking Shack. It was built when the afore mentioned gentlemen were in school so that Lupin could have a place to go when he transformed into a werewolf. Originally, his three friends didn’t know that he was a werewolf, but they eventually put the pieces together, much like Hermione did, and figured it out. As a response, they worked out how to become Animagi (Harry’s dad as a stag, Black as a dog, and Pettigrew as a rat) so that they could run around as animals with him each month. Werewolves are apparently less dangerous to animals than to humans.
The reason that Snape holds such a grudge against Harry is because he went to school with his dad and Black tricked him into going into the Shrieking Shack one evening when Lupin was transformed. Harry’s dad saved his life though, but he still assumed that the elder Potter had something to do with the rather nasty trick played on him. In order to keep Remus’ lycanthropy a secret, no punishments were ever rewarded for the trick. Snape’s grudge was carried on to Harry along with a life dept.[/spoiler]
I was quite frustrated that the third movie never explained all of that. The Shrieking Shack scene doesn’t seem like it should make as much sense without it.
MisMossie , thanks for the explanation. It certainly sheds some light. I didn’t really question why there was a shack, or where the map came from, so I wasn’t confused by the lack of explanation in the movie.
I haven’t found the films hard to follow, but Prisoner was the only one I’d consider good, and part of the reason I could tell were adaptation issues. In the two Chris Columbus films, it felt that they were trying to be incredibly faithful to the books. How, as a non-reader, could I tell? Because of extended sequences or character introductions that largely had nothing to do with nothing (like the torturous sequence with the talking hat), so I assumed they were included because they were favorite parts of the books.
Conversely, the 4th film was a jumble, with lots of disjointed jumping from one scene to another, and with lots of characters behaving one way and then all-of-a-sudden behaving a lot differently. It reeked of drastic compression, so even having never read the book, I could tell they were squeezing in more than they can reasonably manage.
But the third film was terrific. Was it faithful to the book? Don’t know, don’t care. It’s the only one with an interesting story & resolution where I cared about Harry & co. (and it has the best VFX of the lot, which makes several of the other films distracting because of the lower quality).
