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The fourth film about Harry Potter on Moscow screens
In Harry Potter's (Daniel Radcliffe) fourth year at Hogwarts School of Wizardry, they are preparing to welcome guests from all over Europe. The Triwizard Tournament is coming - one of the most important competitions in the magical hierarchy, designed to choose from the champions of different schools the one and only most powerful magician. The Goblet of Fire, which is disturbed only in the most critical cases, selects three participants in the tournament. But when the ritual is almost over and the chosen ones are named, the cup suddenly gives out another name. It’s not hard to guess which one. So Harry, who is in no way suitable for the competition either by age or experience, is forced to go through all the stages of the magic competition - and try not only to win, but at least to stay alive. And this is all the more difficult, since in the immediate vicinity of Hogwarts the foul breath of Harry’s main and most dangerous enemy - and indeed of all living things in general - is already clearly felt...The film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - a thick volume of 734 pages - was originally planned to be divided into two separate films and released several months apart. But Newell, after consulting with Prisoner of Azkaban director Alfonso Cuaron, eventually convinced the studio that he could fit the main events of the book into one episode without too much damage, without turning Goblet of Fire into a Tarantino-esque Killing Harry opus. And he kept his promise. Despite the fact that even with a duration of 2 hours 37 minutes, the intervention of editing scissors is obvious, it does not particularly affect the clarity or fascination: Newell, as a competent architect, really cut off everything unnecessary. In many ways, this is also why his film turned out to be, perhaps, the first in the Potter series, which can be discussed as a completely valuable film work in its own right, and not just compare it with the previous parts. Perhaps this would have happened much earlier if Newell (by the way, the first Briton to film JK Rowling's books) would have become, as expected at the time, the director of the very first Potter film. But be that as it may, the epic very timely added gloom and psychologism - in full accordance with the words addressed to Harry: “Difficult and difficult times are coming ahead” (Professor Albus Dumbledore, performed by Michael Gambon, pronouncing this maxim is paradoxical, but from that Mikhail Ulyanov quotes no less intonationally and precisely in the first “Antikiller”: “Troubled times are coming, Gangrene, troubled times...”). In Hogwarts and its environs, this time there will be an abundance of “fantasy violence” and “frightening images” (this is how the reasons are formulated that for the first time in the history of the series cost “The Goblet of Fire” age restrictions). Dragons are for once not only “terribly impressive”, but also simply creepy, looking at them is not so much interesting as it is scary; mermaids also do not quite correspond to the usual ideas based on Andersen and Disney; the appearance of the leader of one of the Eastern European magical schools, Igor Karkaroff (Predrag Bjelac), seems to be deliberately copied from “Rasputin the Mad Monk”, whom Christopher Lee played in the British studio Hammer horror film; The maze competition is as chilling as the corresponding scenes from Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King's The Shining. Finally, for the first time, in all his ugliness, the Dark Lord Voldemort appears on the screen - the One Whom They Don’t Speak Out Loud, and until now they preferred not to show. In his appearance - in fact, very scary - there is absolutely nothing human, and yet the Dark Lord has nothing in common with the lifeless special-effect faces of the usual cinematic evil spirits. He is played (and this word is more than appropriate here) by Ralph Fiennes, who once again, using the most seemingly strange and inappropriate material, proved that he is a performer, whose equals there are few today. The one about whom they do not speak, by the will of artists and make-up artists, almost devoid of anthropomorphic features, is given away by his eyes. And their dark light turns out to be more than enough to put the villain from the world-famous children's book on the same plane with the previous, selected roles of this great actor - in "Schindler's List", "The English Patient", "The End of the Affair", "The Spider". It is Fiennes' involvement as evil personified that makes it clear that Harry is truly in serious trouble. And that the next series, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” which is scheduled to premiere in 2007, will finally move the series about a boy wizard from the category of traditional vacation entertainment into the category of absolutely serious cinema, which is quite appropriate to go to at any age.