Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I've fallen for the Harry Potter series in recent weeks, burning through 1300 pages in the last 10 days, finishing both The Order of the Phoenix and The Half-Blood Prince. I've been on the jones to check out David Yates's adaptation of The Order of the Phoenix since and finally found the time this evening. While Yates crams most of the novel's highlights into his feature, his film suffers from too much detail and not enough divination, reminding one of the meandering Chamber of Secrets rather than the tumultuous Goblet of Fire.

At the same time, the details were definitely appreciated. I was hoping to see Seamus (Devon Murray) and Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) confront one another, watch Fred and George (James and Oliver Phelps) test their Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, view the Black family tree, listen to Luna Loovegood's (Evanna Lynch) oddly poignant points of view, and cheer while Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis) threatens Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter). But the details kept bombarding, leaving me with galleons of information to bank in a knut's worth of time. It’s refreshing to encounter all of these nuances and see the characters given their two to three minutes of screen time, but removing some of their dialogue and focusing more intently on a fewer number of plot threads would have given The Order the chance to build to a strong finish, rather than meandering onwards towards a lacklustre climax. I suppose this problem was to be expected due to the 700 plus pages in the book, but sometimes including terse tidbits of tenaciously constructed literary action causes the scenes displayed to lose much of their emotional depth, notably the infantilized centaurs, the confrontation between Professor McGonagall (Maggie Smith) and Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), and every scene involving Sybil Trelawney (Emma Thompson).

I suppose The Order of the Phoenix delivers another entertaining escape into the Potter realm, even if it's somewhat hasty. And it certainly enhanced my crush on Luna Loovegood, leaving me comfortably daydreaming about a stroll past a lakeside beech tree, just in time to watch a Giant Squid frustrate some Merpeople. But it could use a spontaneous difference, an extended unexpected break in the magical material, to round out its structure and diversify its focus.