I hadn’t ever seen ANY of the film adaptations in their entirety (friends kept putting them on as background, until it got to the point that I’d seen so MUCH of them in a sort of half-conscious way that starting one from the beginning seemed like a horrible re-hashing to no reward, since I hadn’t been impressed with anything I had seen) I ended up seeing this before it opened, at the local IMAX theatre, because a friend got tickets.

Personally, I saw it as a total reference to WWII in a number of ways. Firstly, you had Dumbledore as Churchill, screaming at Parliament “We can’t DISarm! Germany’s getting more and more powerful! You fools!” and then you have the establishment blithely ignoring him, and doing all they can to keep things business as usual. Etc. Everyone knows that story. But with that in mind, I kept noticing parallels between Nazi imagery and Ministry of Magic imagery. For example, the seal of the Inquisition or whatever it was called was very swastika-esque, and the big picture in the Ministry (was that Fudge? Crappy seats in an IMAX theatre make stuff really distorted at times) reminded me of pictures of Der Fuhrer! or whatever from WWII flicks. Also, the booming loudspeakers announcing things is another old standby from WWII flicks.

I’m sure there was more, because it was so easy to find stuff when everything was squished and curved. I thought the film as a whole was great, and I’ve decided to give the first three flicks a belated chance on the basis of it - and I’m also going to watch it again when it hits DVD, so I can see it all proper-like.

As far as the ineptitude or vileness of the two main antagonists of the film (odd that Voldemort doesn’t really seem to be a major antagonist), the point was not that they were stupid, or evil, but that they were horribly misguided. I don’t know if you’ve read the books, but the book makes them even more frustrating, while making their position a little more understandable. Essentially, Fudge is… well… the British government during the World War interregnum. Convinced that the people who are crying wolf are either alarmist, or attempting to use fear to gain power in the government, they bury their heads in the sand not out of outright stupidity, or a desire to see Nazis/Voldemort triumph over all that is good, but because they’re so stuck in their conception of the way the world is that they ignore any evidence to the contrary. The “bad” party in the Honor Harrington books is often portrayed in the same light, probably as a reference to the same events in British history.

That’s how I see Fudge. Umbridge? Ehn; I don’t remember her being in the least sympathetic in the book, and she certainly wasn’t in the film. She’s not involved in creating policy, she’s just the type of conservative numbskull who doesn’t question orders, and doesn’t think rules are applicable to people doing “the right thing” and so on, much like… well, a number of Bush appointees, to draw parallels to recent American history for a change. Still, I don’t see her as evil in intent.

It’s funny, because I think you were implying you could see the film as a condemnation of the Bush administration, and I walked away wondering if it was a justification of the War on Terror(tm).