Book-Movie Comparison: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

As a film, The Goblet of Fire is probably in my top 2 or 3 of the series, but as an adaptation, it’s more of a mixed bag.  The first adaptation of one of the longer books, it has the tough job of cutting the story down to a more manageable length, and while it mostly does well, there are definitely places where certain plots/characters get the short shrift (spoilers.)

There is just a lot of book in this book, and the movie’s streamlining is pretty reasonable.  Cutting Ludo Bagman isn’t much of a loss, nor is the whole plot about Hermione and S.P.E.W. – the latter loses that dimension on house elves, which is an important continuing demonstration of the wizarding world’s relationship with non-humans, but the S.P.E.W. stuff is so much more annoying than I remember, so I don’t miss it too much (more on that another day.)  It would’ve been nice to see the scenes with Sirius sneaking back into England and hiding out, but it’s not a must; the same goes for Rita Skeeter being a secret Animagus.  Different cuts necessitate certain plot changes – the twins running bets on the Triwizard Tournament instead of betting on the Quidditch World Cup, Harry getting the gillyweed from Neville instead of Dobby – and it mostly works well.

Inevitably, though, there are some cuts that I feel much more strongly about.  That’s a hard problem to avoid, since pretty much every scene is going to feel essential to someone.  I know mine aren’t necessarily vital to the story, but that doesn’t make me want them any less.  Personally, I miss the more complex story about Barty Crouch and his son, as well as Percy’s involvement in that plot – virtually everything about Percy is excised from the later films, and that begins here.  I also wish we could’ve gotten more with Viktor Krum/him liking Hermione.  He’s an interesting character to me, and he’s a virtual non-entity in the movie (so is Fleur for that matter, but I like Krum better, so I feel his shortchanging more keenly.)  I would’ve liked to see the stuff about Rita Skeeter’s exposé on Hagrid being half-Giant (again, it shows the wizarding world’s prejudice,) and, since I enjoy Bill and Charlie Weasley, I wish we’d at least gotten to meet them here.

Some nice standout scenes in this film, with pride of place going of course to the graveyard scene.  I also really like some of the scenes with Moody (especially teaching the Unforgivable Curses and turning Malfoy into a ferret,) and the Yule Ball drama is probably some of the best teen-romance stuff in the series.  Besides that, I just enjoy the relatively-breezy feel that much of the film has, with the script and Mike Newell’s direction playing up some good humor, especially with the twins.

The usual strong additions to the cast.  Ralph Fiennes is just fantastically evil as Lord Voldemort – so, so good – and Brendan Gleeson is pitch-perfect as Mad-Eye Moody, covering the very different sides of the character well.  (Side note:  I’m not sure if it was him, David Tennant, or Nichols who came up with Barty Crouch Jr.’s weird tongue-flicking thing, but it cracks me up.)  Additionally, Miranda Richardson, who’s awesome as Rita Skeeter, is clearly having a ball.