Harry having his mother’s eyes was such an important part of the story; but when young Lily has brown eyes, that really got me mad. They could have used contact lenses or computer effects or something to make the actress’ eyes match Dan Radcliffe’s.
To the people responding to this confession with variations on the theme of ‘Dan couldn’t wear contacts!’, consider this: we know. Which is probably why the confession didn’t mention their eye color, but the fact that Harry has his mother’s eyes. The fact that Harry has the same eyes as Lily–same color and same shape–is much more important than the color itself, especially because ‘you have your mother’s eyes’ is mentioned in the movies, where his specific eye color is not.
They didn’t even make a cursory effort to get an actress with eyes similar to Dan’s, or digitally correct the color at the very least (which would have been much easier to do with the girl playing Lily because she was in, what, ten seconds of film?), making it particularly egregious when the film literally fades out from Lily’s eyes to Harry’s and they are approximately nothing alike.
That always bothered me too, if this didn’t make it obvious.
I forgot about the fading from her eyes to his. Oh lawd. You know, when each film came out, I would ignore its flaws, thinking “Oh, they can’t fit everything!” but this kind of mistake and the way they got so many characters completely wrong, including the trio. Yeah. I was hoping that since DH was two films they’d correct some mistakes, but they really didn’t. I can still enjoy the films. I’m still an enormous fan of the actors and the sets and many of the scenes, but yeah. This detail would have been so easy to get right and instead they just didn’t give a shit.
Also, the way Voldemort died was so stupid. And I laughed out loud in the theater when they did close ups of him in that silly apparition fight with Harry. Voldemort is supposed to be scary as hell, not a clown.
Yeah, honestly, how little Kloves & Yates gave a fuck about keeping true to the books, even to the spirit of the books, is pretty evident in how many tiny, easy, details the consistently get wrong. The color of Hermione’s dress at the Yule Ball (was giving her a pink dress so important? we know she’s the girl, guys, we get it, but her dressing gown was periwinkle blue, and she looked damn fine), her hair even. Harry’s hair! (He has, since HP, notably shown up in movies since looking much more like Harry Potter than he ever did in the films.) The lines they took from Ron and Ginny and gave to Hermione, for no real reason except to paint Hermione as Harry’s perfect girl and make Ron seem like the comic relief and Ginny flat as cardboard. (I’m still angry about them taking one of Ron’s defining moments in book three, when he stood up on his mangled leg clearly in pain but he didn’t care because if Sirius Black was going to get to his best friend he was going to have to get through him to do it, and gave the line to Hermione while Ron was whimpering in the corner.) Calmly. And so on.
I used to make excuses for them too, like ‘oh there’s only so much they could do, we’re lucky to get movies at all’, but these days I’m just…. no. They didn’t care about the books. They didn’t make even a cursory effort to keep true to the spirit of the books, never mind the letter, and forget about keeping the characters fundamentally who they were if their name wasn’t Hermione Granger (and tbh even she suffered because by giving her everyone else’s good qualities and taking away all of her flaws, or framing what flaws they let her keep as her being in the right, they butchered her character as badly as Ron’s, just in a different way).
In the end, the movies are fun to watch, somewhat entertaining and aesthetically appealing (and whoever their set designer was? A+ job, all across the board), but they just aren’t Harry Potter. There is none of the magic that made the series so memorable, so moving. And it’s really sad, because they could have been so much more.
Bingo. By the time it hit GOF, it was painfully obvious that everyone in charge of the movies would have loved to have just called the movies “Hermione Granger and the…” and be done with it.
Besides, didn’t they ask JK about Harry’s eyes not being green, and she responded ‘yeah that’s ok as long as he has his mother’s eyes, that’s what matters, his eyes being green only matters because hers were’? And they couldn’t even manage to get that right in the very scene which shows us why it mattered to start with!
