Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I thought the girl playing Luna was brilliant. Great casting there. Still not nearly as good as POA, but that had one of the best directors on the planet so I guess that's to be expected. It was still better than Chris Columbus's movies. But they should do whatever it takes to get Alfonso Cuarón back for Deathly Hallows.

I didn't remember the book as well as a lot of you did, so a lot of these continuity points didn't bother me.

The problem I had was that things just didn't look remotely close to how I pictured them. As I read about the battle at the end, I got this picture in my head of how the final few places would look. And it was nothing like it. I didn't think the Ministry of Magic looked very foreboding, it just looked black, which isn't the same thing necessarily. From what I imagined in the book's description, I feel that they either didn't read the book or ignored that altogether for something maybe easier to do in CGI.

And I totally didn't picture Grimmauld Place as being so goddamn skinny. What the hell was that?

This movie was really the first that I felt the director had no idea what anything was supposed to look like. Everything else was close before, but, I dunno, the new places that were introduced just seemed way, way off.

Also:

Spoiler involving the final book, possibly:

I seem to remember that the end of OOTP, Neville became this super huge character, he had an important battle at the end and grew throughout the book. And though I don't remember HBP very much, his role in DH is extremely important. But he really didn't do much in the movie. Which doesn't set him up for the future well.

Rita Skeeter is important in DH also, but I imagine they'll just completely cut that out again also.

I dunno, maybe I just feel like as the books get longer, they don't translate well into movies. I don't see how they get away with DH as a movie under 3 hours, I really don't.

Jam it back in, in the dark.