We saw the latest Harry Potter installment yesterday. It’s been getting rave reviews from critics and regular movie-goers alike. Here’s my take:
For a Harry Potter movie, this one seemed painfully slow and halting. Long moments of inane teen angst dialogue filled several scenes. The interplay of the nascent love lives of the characters was interesting and entertaining on occasion, but I don’t go to see a Harry Potter movie to agonize over who’s going to end up in whose arms. Most of the interaction seemed clumsy and unrealistic anyway, including the bumbling towards intimacy of Harry Potter and his new love interest, Ron’s little sister Ginny Weasley.
Interspersed with this ongoing middle-school soap opera were moments of darkness that had the classic Harry Potter lack of believability. The special effects were excellent, as usual, but some of the filming was, to me, downright irritating. One of the key scenes in the movie, of Harry confronting Bellatrix and her Deatheater cronies in a corn field, was filmed at waist level to minimize the visibility of the scene. I couldn’t help but have a “Blair Witch Project” flashback. I find that technique of filming to be perhaps the most annoying thing to have been “added” to a director’s toolkit in the past decade or so. It is supposed to add immediacy and bring the observer in, but it has the exact opposite effect on me, I mostly just turn it off and wait until the scene returns to something halfway understandable.
The “half-blood prince” is the unknown author of a ratty old textbook on potions that Harry ends up with after taking the potions class given by new Hogwarts teacher Horace Slughorn. Essentially the book is presented as a sort of classroom cheat sheet which has all the right answers for how to make potions penciled in because the actual published recipes in the book are all wrong. Since Hogwarts has been teaching potion making for hundreds of years, you would think that a potions textbook which had a dozen errors in one recipe might have been replaced in the time between the half-blood prince taking the classes and Harry’s turn. Especially since the eventual revelation of who the half-blood prince was makes it far more unlikely that the class textbooks would have remained riddled (heh… I made a pun) with errors. But this is the essence of Harry Potter, to make the story interesting Rowlings routinely throws logic, common sense and any sort of believability to the winds… and I guess that’s OK, people love her for it.
I could go on with other similar things, and the use of magic in Harry Potter, especially in the battle scenes, still just makes me shake my head, but my main problem with this movie is that it is just so painfully slow and boring in places. It’s LONG, and you feel every minute of it. When Harry and Ginny finally do manage to steal their first kiss it’s in the process of one of the least comprehensible acts in the movie, but again, who cares? It’s Harry Potter! One thing that did surprise me was how plain the movie made Ginny Weasley appear. In scene after scene she appears frumpy, dumpy or just plain …. plain. Camera angles are poor, makeup is lackluster, her clothes are frumpy… In the book, as I recall (it’s been years) Ginny essentially blossomed from a tomboyish little sister into a stunning young woman. In the movie she just gets taller. Hermione, in comparison, has moments of stunning beauty. I’ve always liked Hermione and I think Emma Watson portrays her nearly flawlessly. Bonnie Wright, as Ginny Weasley, always seems to have just bitten into something unpleasant.
It’s not all bad though, the pursuit of Voldemort seems to have gone into stealth mode, with Dumbledore disappearing mysteriously on occasion, and with him dragging Harry on life-and-death missions on other occasions.
Overall I enjoyed about half of it, and felt more than a bit bored and confused during the other half. But you can’t really miss this movie if you’ve been watching the franchise, so if you have, then get there and watch it.
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Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackA few thoughts…
First, given that Emma Watson is now 19 I’m inclined to give her an official ‘babe’ designation. Consider it done.
Second, I really liked this installment of the Potter franchise primarily because it is more character driven and less reliant on CGI effects. I enjoyed the nascent adolescent love stories and found myself wondering if Hermoine ends up with Harry or Ron (I haven’t read the books).
Third, I HATED the second Transformer film and think our taste in movies may be on inexorably divergent paths.
I did like Megan Fox, however…
Bonnie Wright is 18, I thought Emma Watson was older than that. I thought she, Daniel Radcliffe and whoever plays Ron were all 21.
Maybe I’m being too hard on this movie. It may just be a mood thing. Who knows. I generally like character driven movies, for whatever reason I just didn’t like these characters interacting the way they did. Ron’s dumping of Hermione seemed churlish, his short-term girlfriend had the depth of a petri dish, as did Hermione’s “date”. If I felt the movie had given serious effort to explore these characters I might have felt differently about the movie, but to me it felt contrived and the external love interests of Ron and Hermione simply seemed one-dimensional.
In the “Goblet of Fire” Harry had a relationship with Cho, and Cho ended up being a fully fleshed out character with strengths, weaknesses, conflicts and she engendered in me a certain level of sympathy. In contrast the two characters in “Half-blood prince” seemed contrived and predictable. I got the impression that Rowlings at that point simply said “it’s about time for Hermione and Ron to have a row and to break up for a bit.”
Nope, Emma just turned 19 in April (according to wikipeidia). I think the peripheral love interests of both Ron and Hermoine were intended to be one-dimensional, even comedic, by design. It worked…
You’re in good company, that’s the general reaction of the public and the critics. But for me they didn’t work. My overwhelming reaction to the whole thing is “Why in the world would a girl like Hermione want to get back with someone who treated her like crap the first time he got some attention from a cute girl who wanted to ram her tongue down his throat?” I suppose such things happen in real life, but I found it hard to see Hermione taking that abuse and asking for more. And the Hermione I know would react to unwanted physical advances by turning the guys hands and arms into ACTUAL tentacles to teach him a lesson. Which would not only have been more realistic, but frankly a whole lot funnier than his barfing on Snape’s boots.
Maybe that’s it, maybe my reaction was that the whole thing seemed INTENDED to be “funnier” and more “romantic” instead of simply following the story line and resolving the conflict. It wasn’t as if the romantic story lines were woven into the narrative, they felt like they had been spliced into the story, which alternated between light teen angst romantic comedy and dark fantasy, lurching from one genre to the other.
Some of it was funny. But most of it just seemed out of place to me.
Actually I think I figured out one of the things that has been bugging me about the movie. Harry never got any help from Hermione or Ron. In previous movies he always had Hermione and/or Ron being critical to his success. Maybe what bugged me isn’t so much that Ron and Hermione were mostly comedy relief but that was pretty much ALL they were this time.
Maybe that’s it.
I’m judging this film purely as a film. I haven’t read any of the novels and therefore have absolutely NO preconceptions. As a film, I think it was well crafted and effective – for the most part. The HP franchise is not perfect, or terribly profound, but generally enjoy them.
By the way, I haven’t read any reviews for this film. Like I said, NO preconceptions or expectations…
The big problem that these movies have is that the books progressively got longer and longer making it very difficult to get the whole story in the movie.
The love interest stuff I took to be something light to overcome some of the dark stuff that was coming.
As to the book by the half blood prince, given who it is, it isn’t surprising that that character would hold back improvements or corrections.
I was disappointed by the ending more than anything else. It was a nothing fight rather than an almost epic battle. It was like they spent far too much on the middle stuff and ran out of time so they just whipped out a wand and poof – end it.
The thing to remember most about the HP story is that it was designed more for kids than adults. Though it got more involved in the later books to a point where I think it lost some of the younger readers.
I did think the movie a bit long for the wrong reasons.
The last book is being made into two films. That might have been a better way to handle this one as well given the depth of the story so it would have had enough in it to develop the thing.
I think some of the characters have started to look too old for the part they are playing.
I’m generally in agreement with you, CC. I’m not exactly sure why I didn’t care for HBP as much as the earlier HP films, but this one was a bit boring in places. So much so that I actually drifted off to sleep for a couple of moments about two hours in.
The only thing that comes to mind is that the film was too faithful to the book when it shouldn’t have been (the teen romance stuff) and wasn’t faithful enough when it needed to be (the final(-ish) fight scene).
Boyd, that’s a big part of my disappointment. What happened to “Dumbledore’s Army”? They weren’t even mentioned. There was no indication that all the work and effort Harry and his classmates went to in the previous two movies had ever even happened. After Voldemort appears and removes all doubt about his existence, suddenly Hogwarts becomes a teen romance location and Harry and Dumbledore are the only wizards who even seem to REMEMBER that Voldemort exists.
I dunno, I don’t mind having a little comedy and romance in the movie, I liked that in Goblet of Fire, for instance, but it just feels to me like this movie forgot it was a Harry Potter movie and went down some “Twilight” side road for too long. I hear Dadman and understand that, taken on its own, the movie probably hangs together and is interesting. But it’s NOT on its own, it’s the sixth movie in an eight-movie installment and it’s supposed to advance the OVERALL plot and conflict of the story. Other than the sea-ghouls scene, the very final (poorly done) battle scene and one reference to “Horcruxes” it almost entirely ignored everything BUT the romance and comedy aspects.
I wonder how many people “got” that the ring and the Tom Riddle diary were Horcruxes and that 2/7 of Voldemort’s soul has already been destroyed? I wonder how many people understand that the whole purpose of the “Half-Blood Prince” was to reveal that Voldemort had placed his soul in seven horcruxes by murdering seven (at least) people, and that the MAIN REASON Dumbledore had been missing most of the movie is because he was trying to find the horcruxes. How many people will come away from this movie desperately wondering who “R.A.B.” is? Why is that important?
I do want to make one comment about the potions textbook and the half-blood prince. I think those who feel that the half-blood prince would deliberately allow his textbooks to be incorrect misunderstand the character of the half-blood prince. Which is somewhat understandable, JK Rowlings goes to great lengths to create an ambiguous character with the half-blood prince. She mostly succeeds. In fact the half-blood prince is by far my favorite character in the book. He is really the ONLY character outside of Harry Potter himself who has any real depth or development. But if you have read all the books and understand the final resolution of his character, you should understand that for the half-blood prince to allow the textbook to be so egregiously incorrect is simply not consistent with his character. He is far, far more subtle than that.
A few other points.. since I can’t stop myself. The main conflict in the books over the full series is not Harry Potter vs. Voldemort. It is The Order of the Phoenix vs. the Death Eaters. Dumbledore is the leader of the Order of the Phoenix. Voldemort is the leader of the Death Eaters. In the Half Blood Prince, this conflict becomes much clearer than in previous books, although it was revealed in the book appropriately titled “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” Throughout the Half Blood Prince book, this conflict becomes center stage as there are more and more conflicts between the two groups, and Harry, Ron and Hermione (and Neville Longbottom and others) are more and more involved in the Order, even though the adults in the Order still feel the youngsters are really too young. My memory is fuzzy here, but I seem to recall that Hermione and Neville both are captured and tortured by the Deatheaters before being rescued by the Order, and the running battles between the two groups culminate in the final epic battle in the Tower of Astronomy, or whatever Dumbledore’s tower was called. In that scene Harry did not hide and sit on his hands while Dumbledore is killed, he hides using his invisibility cloak to aid Dumbledore when the Deatheaters come, but Dumbledore places an immobility spell on Harry to keep him from interfering. When Dumbledore dies, the spell is freed and Harry pursues the Deatheaters and there is a fairly major battle through Hogwarts as the Deatheaters make their escape and the Order of the Phoenix comes, too late, to the aid of Dumbledore. In that battle one of the Weasley brothers is badly injured, Ginny Weasley engages a Deatheater in mortal combat and Harry has to battle a werewolf.
To say that I was looking forward to this battle is to put it mildly. For it to turned into a “Avra Kadavra” curse thrown at Dumbledore and then a chase through the woods where the half-blood prince saves Harry by saying he is reserved for Voldemort was quite thoroughly disappointing, to say the least.
CC, after reading your comments, I understand better the complaint you have about the movie. Having read the books, I probably fill in some of the blanks that the movie leaves out.
I know one young girl from church who refused to see any of the movies beyond the first one. Her stance was that the movies wouldn’t do justice to the story as it was told in the books.
I totally agree with your take on the whole ending scene. My son said pretty much the same thing.
I wasn’t disappointed by the movie from an entertainment standpoint. I was disappointed on the lack of following the full storyline.
The final battle in that book was epic. The whole school became involved. In the movie you just had some vandalism in the dining area and poof, Dumbledore is gone. Far too easy an ending for him, making him seem weak. If I remember correctly the attack that killed him was more by stealth… shot in the back type of thing.
I thought the whole part with the cabinet was over done as well. Far too much time spent on the cabinet for little purpose when that time could have been spent on more battle scenes developing the fight between the two groups.
Goat:
I question if anyone watching the movie had any idea that Draco Malfoy was REPAIRING the cabinet. That it was left in the storeroom because Dumbledore and the Order believed it to have been damaged beyond repair. That among the things the half-blood prince helped Draco bring into Hogwarts were items that were used to accomplish that repair. Did anyone in the movie theater have any idea that the cabinet was the KEY to the Death Eater’s strategy since Dumbledore had placed an impenetrable defense spell around the entire school? Had they spent some time showing Draco DOING SOMETHING to the cabinet, instead of just randomly sending stuff through it, perhaps that message would have made it through to people.
It’s not just the final scene, although that’s a huge and obvious aspect of how the movie seems to have ignored the fundamental conflict of the story. There were running battles throughout the book. Student’s parents were disappearing or being killed. People were blaming Harry for the situation. Harry and his group (Dumbledore’s Army) were frustrated by being treated like kids and took risks which led to Neville being tortured. The book was FULL of conflict and full of plot-advancing moments which the movie didn’t underplay, it simply ignored them.
I don’t think there was a SINGLE reference in the movie to the Order of the Phoenix or Dumbledore’s Army. The whole point of the books was to gradually reveal the master strategies of Dumbledore and Voldemort and to build up the conflict between their two groups. The movies, up until now, had faithfully reproduced that growth of tension and conflict.
This movie simply ignored it. Instead of advancing the plot and revealing the larger context of the whole Dumbledore vs. Voldemort conflict, this movie instead chose to pursue what are truly trivial side-plots involving the characters puppy-love moments. Yes, these are in the book (mostly) and they are important in a book where you have page after page to tell the story.
My problem with this movie is that it abandoned the MAIN conflict and plot of the story to pursue these trivial subplots and IN DOING SO, the MAIN conflict and plot was lost. If you read the books you know that these battles and conflict were advanced. You know that the Death Eaters were threatening to not only reveal themselves to the Muggles, but to RULE OVER THEM. You knew that the Prime Minister of Britain was involved and was working with Dumbledore to try to keep the Death Eaters from taking over the world.
I could go on and on and on…
Instead of that, you get a deeply detailed exploration of Hermione’s hurt feelings while Ron is snogging some girl in the corner.
Yes, it’s interesting, yes, it can be funny, but it IS NOT PART OF THE MAIN STORY, and spending scene after scene after scene on that is an indulgence that cost the viewer the opportunity to understand that Voldemort ISN’T JUST AFTER HARRY POTTER! HE WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD!!!!
To me that’s a bit more compelling than endless scenes of Ron and Hermione’s fractured love life.
Cosmic, saw you at the theater. Looked up when credits were rolling and you had disappeared in a puff of smoke!
Heh. Cosmic’s on a roll now!
Again, your perspective is based on the fact that you’ve read the books and have clear expectations when you walk into the theater. From your perspective, I think your criticism is probably spot on.
Movies ALWAYS give novels short shrift and it sounds like the makers of HBP have neglected major plot elements in their telling of the tale.
But, as a Harry Potter illiterate I was not even remotely aware of that and was therefore able to enjoy the film on its own merits.
BTW, I do agree with the criticism that these films don’t build very well from one to another. I imagine the filmmakers do this to a large extent on purpose to ensure the film in comprehensible as a stand alone entity to those that may not be familiar with the entire story arc (if any such people really exist).
JSullens,sorry, we had a bit of a crisis at home we had to deal with.
Dadman, I understand that movies and books are different vehicles. My problem with this movie is that it derailed the primary plot and conflict in the STORY.
The previous movie, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” did a good job of revealing the existence and purpose of the Order, and the final battle in that movie demonstrated that Voldemort was alive and the Deatheaters were back.
The whole PURPOSE of the Half-Blood Prince part of the story was to develop the conflict between the Order and the Deatheaters, and to reveal the one vulnerability that Voldemort had, which was the Horcruxes. A big part of that was the revelation of the true intentions of Voldemort, which had been thwarted when his attempt to kill the infant Harry Potter had instead backfired and nearly obliterated him instead. Those intentions were nothing less than to rule the world, wizard and muggle alike. To demonstrate that evil the book shows Voldemort and the Deatheaters murdering and torturing many people, while also wreaking havoc in the muggle world. In the book you get a real sense of malevolence and of danger. The Order pretty much dominates the book, with Harry’s “Dumbledore’s Army” being frustrated by their limited role, which leads Harry and others in his group to take foolish risks.
I simply don’t think that any of that is conveyed in the movie. I got no sense of impending doom. I got no sense of malevolence. I got no sense of conflict between two powerful factions whose actions were causing massive collateral damage…
The book is epic. The movie is not. Why the director chose to ignore the epic aspects of the book to focus on young love and pratfall comedy is simply beyond me. It is going to make it much harder for the final movies to recapture the feelings of menace and doom that the final scenes of The Order of the Phoenix had managed to convey.
I just think it’s a sad loss of opportunity.
I believe I conceded that the film failed to tell the story between the pages adequately and that it does a poor job of building on previous installments. That it entirely failed to convey the primary plot and conflict, well, I think that is an overstatement.
Like I said, I haven’t read the books and frankly have very little emotional (or other) investment in this franchise. I enjoyed the movie. It was 115 outside and the theater was air-conditioned.
OK, so “entirely” may be unfair, after all they spent at least five minutes on the horcruxes. And they did show Dumbledore’s death.
I guess 10% is better than nothing.
To be clear here, NONE of the movies is “true to the book.” But in my opinion ALL of them so far have been true to the STORY until this one. This one, in my personal, subjective opinion, was NOT.
My parents, die-hard potter folk, agree with you Cosmic. They detested the movie on similar grounds as you. Being a non-Potter-book-reader myself, I found it less offensive. Not as good as previous movies, though.
I fully agree about the things that were left out completely. The length of the movie was too long to have left out ALL of those things you mentioned.
I think, given how things had developed in the books, it would have been better to go to the two movies per book format with the HBP as well. Far too much going on that should have been shown.
I recently finished re-reading “Deathly Hallows” (the final Potter book), and I have some agreement and some disagreement with you, Cosmic. But on the important parts, I’m in complete agreement.
First, the small stuff: In your description of some of the stuff left out of this movie, you included things which actually happened in “Hallows,” such as the capture and torture of Hermione, Neville and Luna. The epic, throughout-the-school battle sounds more like the final battle in Hallows. As I recall HBP, all of the final fight occurred outdoors.
Be all of that as it may, there were some key plot elements that the HBP book advanced to support Hallows. Unfortunately, the movie consistently failed to advance them.
So I’ll throw in and support Cosmic’s original conclusion that the HBP movie completely failed to accomplish what should have been its main goals.
Goat:
I think it’s really a matter of priorities. The book would be diminished without the puppy love affairs which allowed Rowlings to pace the darkness in the book effectively. In my opinion the movie would have been immmeasurably improved if they had taken half of the time devoted to the adolescent angst and instead devoted it to the conflict between the Order of the Phoenix and the Deatheaters. You know, the actual MEAT in the book… They spent way too much time on the hors de’ouvres….
Boyd…. heh.. you got some right and some wrong. There are TWO battles inside Hogwarts in the story, one in HBP and one in DH. In fact I checked into that last night and found an interview with the director who said the final battle in Hogwarts in HBP was purposefully left out because they felt it was too similar to the battle at the end of Deathly Hallows.
Yeah, I probably got the timeline of Hermione’s and Neville’s torture messed up. But still, there was plenty of torture and death in HBP that was entirely left out. In my defense I did say that I THOUGHT I remembered those parts as being in HBP but I wasn’t certain….
In fact my recollection is somewhat vague here too, but I think that the Deathly Hallows battle occured more outside the walls of Hogwarts than inside…. I probably should read them again…
OOPS!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!! Don’t read if you don’t know what happened in Deathly Hallows!
In my memory Voldemort essentially laid seige to Hogwarts and eventually Harry gave himself up by walking outside to meet him… I think…… and I just can’t help it…
Remember in the Civil War when the Union and Confederate soldiers called off the Second Battle of Bull Run because they had already fought there before?
OF COURSE NOT! YOU FIGHT WHERE YOU HAVE TO FIGHT!
To pull a major plot-advancing, action-packed battle from the movie because it “looked too similar” to another battle is tantamount to cinematic malpractice.
I mean what if Peter Jackson had said “Helm’s Deep? Nah… too much like the Siege of Gondor. We’ll just put some more scenes of Aragorn canoodling with Arwen….”
I mean I’m just sayin’…
Your “spoiler” is correct (unless you’re saying it was only a siege, and not a fight), but the final fight was very much fought both within the halls of Hogwarts and on the grounds.
Yep… I did not mean to imply it was all outside.
I simply can’t understand the Director’s decision to not have a major plot-critical battle in the movie because the setting was the same as another battle. It hurts my head to think of what could possibly generate such a bizarre decision.
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