I saw the Harry Potter movie last night, and, as usual with a Harry Potter movie, I came away puzzled. It looked great, it was intriguingly dark in places, it made all the right moves, yet, once again by half way through I was looking at my watch and wondering why the cinema seats were so uncomfortable. I decided I’d try to analyse why I’m so bored by Harry Potter, while Frodo keeps me entertained for hours.
First things first.
- Bad Acting.
Let’s be honest here. The leads (ie the children) aren’t very good at the acting thing. Even surrounding them with first rate actors like Gary Oldman, Richard Griffiths, David Thewlis doesn’t hide the fact they don’t have the emotional range, the technique, the power or the subtlety they need. But that isn’t necessarily a problem: Lord of the Rings brims, almost overflows, with acting of the fine old mahogany variety. - It’s adapted from a book and it shows.
The story meanders, has silly little detours, elements and characters that just don’t go anywhere. Hmm. Maybe. You can get away with a story that isn’t taut, but you’d better make it funny while you do so. And, thinking about it, Lord of the Rings did have most of its diversions pruned out (to the intense chagrin of Tom Bombadil fans everywhere). - Deus ex machina ending.
Definitely. I was bored stiff by the end, so I’m not sure this is right, but as far as I remember Voldemort was slugging it out with Dumbledore (why not Harry I don’t know) when the day was saved by the sudden, unmotivated, and and highly convenient arrival of a load of people from the Ministry. Voldemort takes one look, gets scared, and for some reason does a runner. (Hardly the behaviour of the big bad arch demon he has been set up to be.) But then we never actually get Frodo face to face with Sauron anyway either in Lord of the Rings, and that works.
OK. So you know what I think the real problem is?
It’s to do with integrity.
The world of Harry Potter feels like it has been thrown together from elements stolen from every children’s book ever written, all jumbled together like a bag of Botts Beans because each element feels good. The overall effect is thematic confusion. After five or so movies I still don’t think Harry Potter land feels like a real place.
Whereas Middle Earth feels utterly real.
To my mind that comes from Tolkien’s deep understanding of Old English literature, and his obsessive need to work out every inch of the land and every year of millenia of imagined history.
Just a simple example: The names in Middle Earth all feel real. Each race in the story has its own vividly imagined culture, and the way the names grow round different themes and phonetic clusters is just the most obvious sign of that.
The names in Harry Potter feel like a fistful of weak jokes thrown at a wall.
When the dragon flies out over the town of Dale, Tolkien’s references to Beowulf, in both the vocabulary he uses and the actual story events, feel earned, and valid, and organic. I feel like I am witnessing another step in an ancient storytelling tradition that began with oral poets round a fire in a great mead hall.
When JK Rowling gives us giants in this story all I feel is: ‘Oh, another thing she’s stolen and thrown away.’
I could go on, but life is short.
(OK, one last question – can you think of anything in Harry Potter that doesn’t feel like it has been stolen from somewhere else?)
The big question is: Does It Matter? They’re both silly fantasies aren’t they?
Well, they’re both fantasies. But only one of them is silly.
The Lord of the Rings feels like it grows naturally out of a deep understanding and love for a real, powerful history. It feels like a worthy next step in a mythology that sustained an ancient people for centuries.
The Harry Potter books feel like they were cobbled together out of a pile of moments stolen from half remembered children’s books on a two hour train journey in the rain. (Oh. You mean that’s just exactly what happened?) (Sorry, JK, but that story persists…)
As a writer JK Rowling has a ton of personal magic, so she’s worked absolute wonders with her source material – but it’s based on sand and it won’t sustain.
That’s just my opinion, of course.
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@FT: An amusing, yet moot point. What you’re failing to grasp, FT, is that I’m coming from an educational position centered singularly on the idea of transcending narrow mindedness.
What more, it is clear you do not know how to read Sarcasm. While my point was meant to imply, to some degree, that this argument and discussion on the thread was academic in nature, the academic opinion was as futile as the political sphere by comparison. Thus a sarcastic point, rather than one meant to be taken seriously.
However, if we are to delve into the nature of education and opinion, I’d put forth that education does narrow points of view, within a certain scope of topics. Rather, in the vast majority it only supplies knowledge on which to base opinions by comparison. If we are to use the scientific method (question, hypothesize, test, theorize, conclude) not one of us on this thread have done this in respect to the examination of Harry Potter or its comparison to LOTR. That said, I (at least) can bring to the point that as both a professional writer and an educated one at that, the nature of the films versus the books is a topic of debate that has existed for sometime and I provided my own opinions formulated about the films in question after reading and understanding those debates that came before it. This gives me an advantage in the discussion and by way validates it because others would agree with me on it. Since my education is in fact, creative writing and scriptwriting, my entire educational career has been about redacting common processes to writing and the sphere there in. In other words, my very purpose in educating myself is to in fact break the very conventions that confine and restrict writing, by understanding them and knowing what is expected and thus knowing how to deliberately step outside those bounds.
To my mind both harry potter and lord of the rings are beautiful but completely unwatchable films ever. Lord of the rings just irritates on so many levels and is almost as slow as a space oddysey which at least held fascination and awe.
Harry Potter goes to a school where they teach him how to wave his wand like some kind of advanced phd only its so obviously just wand waving. The characters are devoid of any character and films just seem to move without any sense at all. Sorry JK I just dont get it.
This thing is still alive, hahahahahaha! XD
Doesn’t lord of the rings annoy you aight? All those silly names pointed ears and silly shaped houses with silly bravery from silly characters.
Shouldn’t Harry take lessons from adrian mole on how to be a teenager or is having zero personality the new character development.
I don’t particularly like shakespeare but give me the tempest any day of the week. Where for art though Caliban I have some trinkets.
What do you think?
I love the hp books—big fan! Know them by heart. I like the Lord of the rings series too but have read them twice only (the second book was a bit of a drag). I think the deal is that HP started out as a pure kids book and then JK tried to adapt it for adults as time passed (of course the HP fans were growing up during the years between books). Lord of the rings never was meant for kids- it’s a purely adult book with war strategies, complicated love stories and history of various races/ worlds (very boring stuff for little 4th grade kids). Hence the difference in the structure/ detail of the books. Also, lets face it—the movies were VERY bad. Very bad acting and directing and the adaptation from book to movie very poorly done. Yes they kids were first time actors but so was Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, the Olsen twins and Haley Joel Osmont (6th sense) amongst many others—they were all brilliant. And I don’t think that I can excuse bad acting 7th frigging time in a row. Fine, the first movie maybe I’d excuse them but the 7th? Come on!
Another thing- the movies get very hard for someone to understand who hasn’t read the books (like my bf just cant seem to follow what;s going on- too disjointed for him and the directors take too much for granted) where as I read the Lord of the Rings after I saw the movie and I understood the movie just fine without the books.
I don’t LOTR, in fact I love it. I don’t mind Harry Potter as well. But what book(s) that really annoy me is the Twilight Saga! But we couldn’t do much could we? A lot of books published today were really bad or annoying to read, safe for a good few.
I think SK do have a point.
Love you sk! :*
Hey Phil nice post, but for my money you could have gone further. Sitting through any of the HP installmants is like spending a couple of hours in a house of mirrors…in the end you’re a little confused and just relieved to get out. I personally don’t see how people can watch this banal, underachieving crap and come out starry-eyed. Try as I may to suspend belief my intelligence keeps fighting back, like some punch-addled palooka crawling off the mat, swinging wildly, unable to stay down without a fight. The HP world is a total hodge-podge (adding stinky-winkies and muggle-dougies doesn’t equal depth), The “plots” are threadbare, and the acting – b’jeezes. It’s not just that the three main characters can’t act, it’s that they are so OBVIOUSLY acting, and badly at that! When they’re on the screen together it looks as if they’ve never been properly introduced. Half-way through each film I stop empathizing with their plight and secretly start rooting for something to kill them and put the franchise out of its misery.
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