Harry Potter and the Massively Condensed Story

So hubby-Eric and I went to see the latest Harry Potter tonight. I wasn't expecting it to be terribly good, because so much happens in the book that a full adaptation would take WAY more than 3 hours, but I didn't expect it to be quite this bad.

Don't get me wrong. I liked what I saw. But what was left out was so mismatched that the movie felt like the book in fast forward with lots of the bits ending up in the wrong place. I can't imagine that anyone who sees the movie without first having read the book will have any clue as to what is going on most of the time.

Completely gone was the entire house elf subplot... no Dobby, no Winky, no clues to the plot through them. Almost missing was the Rita Skeeter subplot, and it fizzled out after starting to build, like someone thought it might make the final cut then decided to drop it. Hints of the tension between Snape and Karkaroff emerged, but Karkaroff's choice to run away is gone. Nothing at all about Hagrid's secret being revealed, and what it cost him. The entire betting subplot with the twins and Bagman is gone, although as if to make up for it the twins take bets on everything else. The Triwizard winnings and what Harry does with them is also gone. The elder Mr. Crouch... Harry finds him dead but DOESN'T BOTHER TO ACTUALLY TELL DUMBLEDORE, which I assume is why he went up to the office.

It's like somebody took a bunch of scenes from the book and said "Harry goes to find Dumbledore in this scene, and in this other scene he goes to Dumbledore's office and peeks into the Pensieve, so we'll just combine those two," even though it makes no sense, plotwise, to do so.

Each scene was well-done, for a movie adaptation. But instead of feeling like a movie, like it was telling a story, it felt like just a series of scenes. And while I'm sure I will look back at it and think of the characters as the definitives for their roles, and while I think the acting was overall excellent, it still just wasn't much of a movie.