This review contains a spoiler, in that the movie is different from the book and I'm gonna talk about that. If you haven't seen the movie, you may want to before reading the review. If you haven't read the book, why are you hesitating???

Well, I wanted to like this one. I loved the first two Harry Potter movies, HP and the Sorcerer's Stone and HP and the Chamber of Secrets, thought they were really excellently done, kept to the spirit of the books while using the cinematic format (yes, I can use big words, it's my review) to delight viewers and show a lot of the good stuff.

This is the third movie, and I am not as happy with it. It started out pretty well...as in the other two, there were minor rewrites for the sake of shortening it to a manageable length...nothing really exceptionable. But by the end, I was fairly NOT HAPPY with this one for two reasons:

Firstly, this book is longer than either of the first two, and it seemed to me that because of that, to even clock the movie in at two and a half hours (and I went to the 10:30 pm show on a weeknight, do the math on that one, ouch!), this meant that the writers just put in the plot points. A lot of the character development from the book, the kind of thing that had made the first two movies so good, was just not there...just the bare events and as little dialog as possible to hold it together.

Secondly...they did SERIOUS REWRITES in this one. They changed it so that Snape is not the one who collars the kids and Sirius (and I think that was very important character development, since Potter and Snape really have to have some basis for hating each other so much in the fourth and fifth books, and this was where it really took off). Plus, at the end of the book, Harry finds out who Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs are...and why a silver stag appeared when he finally chased the Dementors. This is HUGELY IMPORTANT character development for Harry...and NOT A BIT of it is in the movie. Huh? makes no sense! unless it's going to start off the next movie, but that doesn't work either...

And the next book...not only is it the longest of the five, but a whole lot of stuff happens...how the heck are they going to fit that into even a three hour movie, make it comprehensible to the few who have not read the books, and not cut half of it out?

And of course, the movies are taking longer and longer to film...in this one, Daniel Radcliffe is 15 playing a 13 year old...and it's only going to get worse. Can't wait for Harry et al to start sprouting body hair and changing voices two years early!

Ah well. Go see it, you have to. But I wouldn't recommend buying it, even for the cool special effects. Read the book again, it's cooler.

Although I did like Buckbeak a lot...