With searchlights blazing hundreds of metres into the night sky, neon blistering everywhere and a battery of digital cameras capturing every second, the most ultra-modern city on earth seems a million miles from the forbidding stone walls of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
But it was here last night in Tokyo that the world was led back – with a good dose of Hollywood razzmatazz – into the realm of magic and given its first glimpse of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: the film that sees the boy wizard growing up to face the dreadful truth of his destiny.
For it is in this latest – fifth – cinematic outing of J.K. Rowling’s saga that Harry painfully begins to understand the battles with evil that lie ahead. It is a film where the balance of narrative tips from action to intrigue and there are some that will find that tedious.
But why, with a cast full to the brim with British talent, a British author and Hollywood’s own brand of special effects magic, should the film have had its world premiere in the Japanese capital? The answer may lie with the movie’s producer, Warner Bros, and the grim commercial dynamics of the notorious “Narita Index” – the number of screaming fans who greet a given Hollywood star at Tokyo airport. When he last landed for a Japanese premiere five years ago, Daniel Radcliffe was greeted by a hysterical brigade of 2,300 fans. Wednesday’s arrival by the teenage actor – admittedly quite early in the morning – drew an emaciated platoon of only 30 autograph-seekers.
And it is this that most worries Warner Bros, Disney and the other tinseltown studios. Last year’s Japanese box office (the second-biggest in the world for Hollywood) saw domestic films narrowly out-gross Hollywood for the first time since 1985. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the sole offering that prevented a total washout for Hollywood in 2006.
Collectively, Hollywood has decided that it may be time to treat its Japanese audiences with a little more respect. Hence, the latest Harry Potter film was the third Hollywood world premiere (after Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest) to be held in Tokyo in three months. Yesterday, with a lacklustre al fresco cavalcade of special effects and just a single beaming starlet, you could see that some effort was being made. For their part, a relatively sparse throng of Japan’s die-hard muggles pretended to take the tinseltown bait. The film itself is a solid, occasionally spectacular set-piece that struggles unsuccessfully to give us thrills and fun we have not already had in previous instalments.
It is far crueller than its predecessors and begins to introduce properly the idea that we are no longer in an amusing magical playground, but are en route to an epic confrontation with real victims.
The main story at this stage is the quest of Harry and Dumbledore to persuade an increasingly paranoid and uncomfortable wizarding world that its unspeakably vile nemesis, Voldemort (played by Ralph Fiennes), has returned.
The acting skills of Radcliffe (Harry), Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) and Emma Watson (Hermione) have improved, but not enough to truly flesh out the characters and provide the narrative depth that this transitional, plot-advancing film needs. They have got “angry” and “determined” down pat at this point, but struggle somewhat on the more nuanced grimaces. Harry’s bellowing cod-psychoanalysis of Voldemort is jarringly awful.
Of the adult actors, Imelda Staunton as Dolores Umbridge – Dumbledore’s usurper at Hogwarts – is exquisitely dislikeable. Helena Bonham Carter as the villainous Bellatrix Lestrange is a shining but underused talent.
The director, David Yates, has inserted some lovely touches, including the Weasley twins’ explosive transfer from the world of academia to the world of retail. But overall there is a shortage of those joyful little glimpses of the wizarding world’s furniture that punctuated and perked up the previous films.
The fifth – and longest – book on which the film is based plays a crucial but faintly turgid role in the saga. Much is explained, much is left hanging and there is nothing like the pace of action that readers had grown accustomed to in earlier episodes (especially The Goblet of Fire). The book pulled this off because it was tantalising in what it didn’t tell us.
The film, meanwhile, a necessary digest of the 800-page book, leaves us faintly annoyed that the true denouement of the cycle is now two movies distant.
The chief problem, though, is not really a fault of the film but the near universal Potter-literacy of its prospective audience. Most Potter fans are now laser-focused on the release of the climactic seventh book in three weeks’ time and its promise to bring together the countless loose ends.
As the waiting for the final book grows unbearable, there are moments when this otherwise enjoyable film, though nicely made and through no fault of its own, feels like a chore to be got through before the main course.
— Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is released in Britain on July 12.
Can't Wait to see it!!!
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