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Having seen the entire Harry Potter series as each installment was released, it was really only the first four films that ever stuck with me distinctly. After The Goblet of Fire, though, everything started to blur together in my memory, to the point where I couldn’t tell you—for the love of God—what The Half-Blood Prince is even about, or what happens in this one, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, before this rewatch. What I retained were only scattered fragments: the one with Dolores Umbridge, and the vague sense that the final two films are mostly about Harry hunting down Horcruxes. As it turns out, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is, indeed, the Dolores Umbridge one.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix picks up with Harry struggling to convince the wizarding world that Voldemort has returned, only to be dismissed and discredited by the Ministry of Magic. At Hogwarts, the Ministry tightens its grip by appointing Dolores Umbridge as a new authority figure, whose restrictive teaching methods leave students unprepared for real danger. Frustrated by the denial and censorship surrounding them, Harry and his friends take matters into their own hands, forming a secret group to learn defensive magic while a growing sense of dread—and a mysterious connection between Harry and Voldemort—hangs over the school.
Given the ongoing trend of increased color desaturation with each entry, I was pleasantly surprised they didn’t make this film look like a washed-out painting the way they did The Goblet of Fire. As loathsome as her character may be, Umbridge’s obsession with pink actually restores some much-needed color to a franchise that had been steadily draining it over the previous two films. Hogwarts looks inviting again, and even Privet Dr. has some visual appeal. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for other locations, which are steeped in a relentlessly drab palette—most notably the Ministry of Magic, a place that is anything but magical in its design.
At its core, this movie has a genuinely cool premise: Harry secretly training his fellow students as part of an underground rebellion against the school, prompted by Umbridge’s curriculum being little more than dry, theoretical busywork. The film also grapples with the role of the media in shaping—and distorting—public perception around major events, giving it a real-world resonance, much like the white-supremacy themes threaded through the earlier films did.
The unfortunate reality is that with Voldemort’s return—and his eventual defeat still four films away—The Order of the Phoenix becomes the first entry in the series that truly feels like an episode of a TV show. The idea of the Order itself is strong, as is the internal war between the students and Umbridge, but both function largely as filler between the film’s bookends: no one believing Harry about Voldemort’s return at the start, and everyone finally being convinced at the end after the first real confrontation—Voldemort and his followers versus Dumbledore, Harry, Sirius, and the rest of the good guys.
The Dumbledore-versus-Voldemort showdown is undeniably cool, but it ends on a flat note when Voldemort abruptly realizes he’s outmatched and simply flees. It’s eerily reminiscent of serialized ’80s cartoons, where the Decepticons, Cobra, or Dr. Claw would retreat at the end of every episode. The only thing missing is Voldemort snarling, “I’ll get you next time, Harry”, before vanishing into thin air.
Another issue that stood out to me was the noticeable downgrade in CGI. The sequence where Harry and his cohorts fly over London and the Thames is particularly rough; their complete lack of interaction with the environment makes it painfully obvious they’re just sitting in front of a green screen. A lot of jokes have been made about the troll in the first film, but the fully CG character introduced here isn’t much of an improvement, despite the six years of technological advancement between the two movies. It’s a textbook example of the uncanny-valley phase CGI went through in the 2000s.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix remains a solid entry in a franchise that doesn’t really have a bad installment, but it clearly marks the point where these films stop functioning as standalone stories and fully commit to being chapters in a single, overarching narrative—one that ultimately makes them harder to tell apart.
