Summary: Best plot-synopsis-converted-to-visual-feat evah!

Umm. yeah. I've read the book, so I was able to follow the action and found it fantastic - it took some of the highlights and rendered them visually, which adds depth and flavour to the book.

If I hadn't, I don't think the movie would have made sense. There were huge swathes of story arc that didn't get on the screen at all.

It was great to hear some real theme music (rather than John Williams' One Great Track revisited) for a change. Visually I thought the film was a little better than I'd expected - I have fairly high expectations for a HP movie, and this slightly exceeded those expectations, so that was nice.

So.. yes, that's about it really. Great visual interpretation of a synopsis, don't expect it to make sense on its own.

Other remarks: Ron is getting rather phwoah, just a few more years to ripen and he'll be scrumptious. Harry likewise, although in a different way. Cedric Diggory more than made up for the lack of Oliver Wood - but I was a bit dissapointed with Krum.

Also: one of the things I quite liked about Peter Jackson's LotR adaptation was that he really did make an adaptation - he didn't just try to put the story on-screen exactly as it was, he changed things where neccessary to ensure that what you see on screen is internally consistent - you don't need any outside information to make sense of what's going on. Seeing this movie - and seeing what happens when a film sacrifices coherency for the sake of remaining faithful to the book - just confirmed that Peter Jackson made the right choice.