Watching the Harry Potter movies for the first time

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I don't see what all the excitement is about this

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Couple hundred million other people say otherwise.

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Do the books give alot more backstory on everything?

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Yeah. The books are up to 800 pages, so a lot is lost in translation. Most fans (myself included) are probably more lenient on the character development due to how we understand how we arrived there from the books. I do think they do fine with this in Prisoner of Azkaban, Order of the Phoenix, and Deathly Hallows Part 1. The others come short.

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I'm just ready to finish the last one and I don't have any desire to rewatch them. I don't see what all the excitement is about this .

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The books are definitely better than the movies. Like all the books are huge mysteries (with the exception of the final book), but in like half the movies they remove this. Like in Goblet of Fire (I think the best mystery of all the books), they tell you in the first 2 minutes of the movie who is behind it, and they can’t make it more obvious if they tried throughout the movie how he’s doing it. In the book it was revealed in the second to the last chapter, and it was completely shocking.

The movies are pretty bad if you don’t know the story and not the best if you do know it. They did a real shotty job for non book readers.

Books are great, you should read them or at least listen to the audio books.

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Do the books give alot more backstory on everything? Because the movies are just a batch of scenes to get to a showdown it seems.

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Oh, yeah. I feel like the first two films did a solid job of faithfully adapting those novels to the big screen. But from the Prisoner of Azkaban onward, until the two Deathly Hallows films, the producers did a piss poor job of really fleshing out the characters and backstories the novels were so well known for.

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Oh, yeah. I feel like the first two films did a solid job of faithfully adapting those novels to the big screen. But from the Prisoner of Azkaban onward, until the two Deathly Hallows films, the producers did a piss poor job of really fleshing out the characters and backstories the novels were so well known for.

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To be honest, I don’t think Harry, Ron, or Hermione are good characters. They are really some of the least interesting characters in the story. I read the art book for “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, and they said they sought to emulate Harry Potter by doing almost the exact opposite of everything it did. They found the main characters to be terrible and the universe to be nonsensical.

As far as great characters in Harry Potter, on the top of my head here they are:

Severus Snape
Albus Dumbledore
Hagrid
Dolores Umbridge
Luna Lovegood
Draco Malfoy
Neville Longbottom

The movie version of the Battle of Hogwarts was an abortion.

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AS for the rest of the movies, very meh.

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To be fair to you, you’ve recently gotten out of watching The Half Blood Prince, easily the worst adaptation of the series when it’s the best book. They fricked it up so badly that they had to remove the best scene in the film because it clashed with the tone and should have been the entire tone of the movie. Really, there should not have been a single scene with the sun in the movie and as many scenes as possible taking place at night: LINK

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1) They don't develop these characters at all. I have zero interest in any of them
2 Sirius Black dies and i feel zero connection to that and although Harry is devastated, the movies don't tell you much at all about him and why it should be heartbreaking.
3) Dobby has just died and while i knew it was coming from the spoilers over the years, he has about 10 minutes total screen time and I didn't find it sad at all

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I don't really have much to say about points 1 & 3 because I honestly only watched each movie once, with the exception of the second Deathly Hallows because it was on TV at some point and I didn't feel like changing the channel. So I can't really offer an in-depth opinion. But point 2 seems a bit unfair. It's not an issue of Sirius' development but of Harry's. Even with a single watch, I can say that the movies make very clear that Harry is abused by his "adoptive" family. More importantly, the fact that he had two Wizarding parents he lost as a baby leaves him feeling a bit alienated from the Wizarding world he never had a chance to grow up in or learn about, especially contrasted with his only experience with the domestic side of the world in the large, close-knit Weasley family. I don't think it takes much to make the jump from Sirius Black, godfather specifically picked by Harry's parents to be part of the family (which contrasts him with Lupin), to the idea that Harry has finally found a touchstone, some semblance of the real family he was robbed of. Harry clearly craves a real, non-abusive family, and Sirius even offered to take Harry in. This can also be logically compared to his rage when he thought Sirius was the one who robbed him in the first place. We don't need to know what makes Sirius tick to understand why it's heartbreaking for Harry. We just need to know what makes Harry tick.

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That doesn’t make him a good character though. Just a plot device.

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The movies don't really show Harry's connection with him. It's always in the back of his mind "I wonder what Sirius is up to/would think about this" as he's running from the law, wrongfully accused.

He's never around but always feels close. His relationship with Harry grows from Prisoner of Azkaban until his death. You get the feeling several times that he plans on adopting Harry but things go awry.

I just rewatched the scene: Harry is in a no-win situation, and his godfather who he plans to more or less move in/work with one this is all said and done flies in, not just to save the day, but does so with the words "get away from my godson." In a world where everyone is a quick spell from death or pain, he physically assaults the offending Malfoy- to me, physical harm always came across as extreme passion or hatred in these books- there just wasn't much of it outside of super emotional events.
They have a chat. It's a fairly dramatic scene where he sorry of tells Harry he's proud of him (You've done beautifully).

Then, I'll give it to you- the book illustrates the death better from what I recall. He sidesteps a spell into a broken portal. In the book, the world goes away, he stares at Sirius who's right there and can see him. Like always, he's present but can't be reached. He looks fine. He still seems ok, and it's utter torture because it happened in such a stupid way that didn't need to happen (to the characters, not from the reader's perspective).

Harry is broken in his home life, he hasn't gotten along well with his two "friends," and his godfather who was always present but just too far away to be felt is now seen, dead but alive, and just too far to be felt.



I thought it was a pretty fantastic way for him to die with the above context. He, as a character, was definitely not particularly well developed. He existed through letters. He had a motorcycle. He was a troublemaker and a badass. Beyond that, you don't get a lot, but I think it's the mystery + the obsession of wanting to know him better that makes him to the reader exactly what he is to Harry- a mystery that we wished we got to know better.

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Shockingly, the one people shite on a lot is Order of the Phoenix, and I thought that was one of the better ones brought to screen

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Umbridge was about as perfect of a casting of a character as you can get, she played that part well.

People like shite on the first two and those are probably the best adapted from the books. People also seem to love PoA and I really don't like that one much.