It may not be the book, but it?s worth watching - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Reviews

Yeah, I know the movies never have and never will be true to the books. Movies and books are two separate things. Cramming a 700-page book into a two and a half hour movie and leaving out key parts as was done in Goblet of Fire justifies this. The first three movie adaptations of the Harry Potter series were no different; the books were less than half the size of Goblet of Fire and still barely made it into two and a half hour movie. So it makes you wonder why the director felt as though Goblet of Fire could successfully be done this way. The movie starts out with Harry having his dream. He soon wakes up and is found in the Weasleys? house, preparing to go to the Quidditch World Cup. Upon their arrival via portkey, they proceed to their tent and attend the World Cup ? the problem is, the match between Ireland and Bulgaria is not actually shown. I was not only expecting to watch the match, but I was expecting to watch a very dramatic match, filled with special effects and exaggerated Quidditch techniques. This was extremely disappointing and led the way to an entire movie leaving out important parts and replacing them with confusion. As most of the population has read the books, we can clearly understand what?s going on. But to someone who has yet to read the book, well...his thoughts on the movie can be summed up in one word: huh? At any rate, here are some things that particularly annoyed me: - The absence of Bagman, Dobby and Winky - The World Cup match not being shown - S.P.E.W. being left out, which could have added a lot of humor to the movie - Rita Skeeter?s being an animagus not revealed - A very sloppy ending which didn?t explain the Minister of Magic?s feeling towards Voldemort being revived - The First Task being unnecessarily long - The Third Task lacking obstacles - Dumbledore yelling and sounding almost mean; I thought Dumbledore was supposed to be calm and soft-spoken And so on and so forth. The acting, as in the last movies, was decent. Granted, I wasn?t really expecting much from the actors, but you?d think you?d see some improvement from the trio, namely, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson. Noticeably different was the music. It didn?t flow as well as in the previous three movies and John Williams? absence could plainly be heard. Overall, though, I?d say that, despite all the flaws, it?s still worth watching. If you?re a true Harry Potter fan, you definitely won?t want to miss this. Just don?t expect what you received from the book. After all, books and movies are two separate things.