I watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban the other night with some friends, after re-reading the book a few days earlier. I am shocked at how much was changed. The movie was fine. I never really noticed the changes a year earlier in the theatres and thoroughly enjoyed it. Watching it right after reading it, however, the differences stick out. Sometimes they’re petty — Hermione slaps Malfoy in the book, punches in the movie — and sometimes they’re more substantial. JKR tells an elaborate story of how — for a few people — Sirius is finally proved innocent; the movie took too many short cuts.
All of this made me wonder: I know this story already. I know the background to something that happens for only a few seconds or is in the background of the shot. How much sense did the movie make to someone who hadn’t read the book? How much more (if any) would someone get from watching it again after having finally read the book?
Final thought: if they did all this editing for POA, what will they do to GOF or OOTP? There is too much to cut in GOF/OOTP. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.
point of interest about the movie…the geography of Hogwarts is all wrong…its way off…and that upsets me…what doesnt upset me though is the majority of the movie was filmed here in Scotland so that scenery you see is where i live!……
just a week till the next book…i’m uber excited
peace
nicola x
You know, I missed a lot of the differences between the book and the movie for #3, because we only saw the movie in Russian. (But saw it many, many times, thanks to the kiddos. . .)
Hubby and I and the oldest have reread the HP books several times. I snobbily thought I wouldn’t like them because of the hype. . . And I was wrong.
I was shocked at the same things. Odd, that the third book, which was longer than the first two, generated a movie that was shorter than the first two. There wasn’t even an explanation as to who the makers of the map were.
I just re-read books 3-5 in preparation for Saturday. Not long now!
I felt the same way when watching PoA for the first and only time. This viewing came immediately after I read through the PoA book for the first time. I enjoyed the previous two movies a lot better, but perhaps that is because I have never read books one and two.
I found myself thinking that parts were in the movie, because I knew the background, and then when I rewatched the movie again recently (PoA, that is) there were parts “missing” that I had only imagined. :-)