The Goblet of Darkness

I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with my parents on Thanksgiving day. This was the second time I saw it, the first time being a midnight showing. Although I liked the movie a lot (it's much better than the book which drags on interminably), seeing it a second time made me realize two things which I talk about below. I can't imagine anyone who could be worried about spoilers at this point, but if there is such a person, don't worry - I don't spoil anything about any of the books in this post.

Disturbing Realization #1: The films are now a lot darker. I'm not talking about the storyline, mind you. That is darker, but in a good way. What I'm talking about is the lighting in the film. In this movie and Prisoner, there is effectively no sun at all. The days are gray and blue and green and so are the nights. For those that would say it's because they filmed in Scotland, well, this is not true as I saw behind the scenes footage and there was plenty of sun during the shooting of key outdoor scenes. A choice was made to cover it up. Case in point - the above picutre of Harry jumping is much brigther than it appears in ANY theatrical showing of the film). The problem with this is two-fold (three-fold if you count the fact that it just plain pisses me off). First, without any color correction, the colors for outdoors scenes are much more drab and murky than they would be with sunlight. Second, theaters have a tendency nowadays to turn down the intensity of bulbs on their projectors (assuming they're using projectors which a lot of smaller ones still do). The result is that the movie becomes even darker. For me and my parents, this resulted in my not being able to see the graveyard scene at all when I saw it the second time. My plea to directors is to not give movies blanket treatments with respect to lighting and color. The Lord of the Rings story was plenty dark at times, but that didn't mean you couldn't see the light of day.

Disturbing Realization #2: The past few books/movies haven't advanced the storyline in a significant way. Watching the ending of Goblet on the big screen really hit this one home. I found myself saying, "Hey! We already know all of this!" The fact is, after Philosopher's Stone, the books do not add any more pieces to the Voldemort/Harry conflict. The next piece we get is in Order (the upcoming movie) where we find out why Voldemort is so bent on killing the boy who lived. Then in Half-Blood we find out how Voldemort managed to not die from his killing curse backfiring. But that's really it for those two books as well. True, Half-Blood solidifes who is on who's side, but I think everybody can see this coming. So, it really raises the question, "Is Rowling just good at creating an entertaining backdrop and not so good at storytelling, or perhaps she originally wanted just 3-4 books and the publishers forced here to spread them out?" I hope it is the latter, and yet, it's arguably just as saddening. We seen this all before, though - The Lord of the Rings was supposed to be one novel. So much for creative freedom in literature.