Released: July 11, 2007
Director: David Yates
*****
The fifth installment in the movie franchise based on the boy wizard suffers the same fate as the previous entry (The Goblet of Fire): too much story and not nearly enough running time. Without drawing any comparison to the novel and without being a film snob, one simple fact illustrates this more than any other: the monotonous and repetitive uses of montages to show the passage of time. Not only do they do a disservice to the characters and story, but the over reliance on this filmmaking technique shortchanges the emotional buildup of the film.
After a summer of denials Voldemort is back by the Ministry of Magic, a new teacher is brought to Hogwarts, Dolores Umbridge. It is clear she is gunning for Harry and anyone who supports him. In a series of increasingly totalitarian moves, the ministry and Umbridge take over Hogwarts with Educational Decrees, finally driving Harry to teach fellow students how to defend themselves against the Dark Wizard.
870 pages is condensed into a 138 minute movie. That's the problem here, not the acting or the effects or the look of the film. Major plot points are glossed over as if they don't matter (Umbridge is little more than an annoyance and not the Evil Character from the book; an entire subplot with Luna Lovegood's heritage is left out; the final battle in the ministry is terribly anticlimactic and just a little confusing; longtime supporting characters are given little to do) while the story itself feels terribly rushed, as if everyone wanted to jump right to the next installment instead of this one. Audiences better pay complete attention to what is happening on screen because the story isn't going to slow down to allow anyone to catch up. Didn't catch the prophecy which propels the finale? Woops. Don't understand the business with Harry and Voldemort? Too bad.
See, at some point a filmmaker and a screenwriter have to know when they've bitten of more than they can chew. Mike Newell, director of part 4, toyed with the idea of breaking the story into 2 films in order to do service to all the competing plots. He obviously decided against it, much to that film's detriment. The same happened here; Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, a 960 page opus, was given a miniseries treatment...four parts of two hours each, for a grand total of 8 hours, more or less. That allowed the relationships between the entire cast to develop over time and the audience to become emotionally involved in the story. Here, it's a race to the finish and what was a feeling of dread in the novel (Umbridge's punishments) are reduced to two scenes here. And when a major character is killed off, the audience really doesn't care because his relationships haven't been fully realized.
The Order of the Phoenix is a bridge between the lighter, kiddie fare of the first four movies and what is destined to be a darker, more adult conclusion to the series. On that count, it succeeds in spades. The pieces are laid down, the situation advanced and the characters moved into position. One just wishes it could have been done a smoother and with an eye toward feeling like an actual movie instead of the cliffs notes version of a novel.