I’ve given you a week to catch it, but some of you may be waiting for this weekend to go see it, so here’s my Great Big Giant Spoiler Alert: I would assume anyone inclined to see this movie has also read the book, or at least knows how the story ends already. Obviously, if you don’t know how the story ends, this post may have some surprises you don’t want to read yet. But more importantly for most Potter fans is that this post discusses some of the (in my opinion, significant) liberties the movie script took with the source material. IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE YET, I WOULD ENCOURAGE YOU NOT TO READ FURTHER. I don’t know how much plainer I can make it than that. My blog will still be here after you’ve seen it, but I don’t want to spoil anything for you or change your expectations. Moreover, even after you’ve read it, this review is really only useful to explain what I thought about the movie - so if you aren’t really interested in that, then skip this post and read something about what Beagle has done lately. Really, I don’t mind.
Good?
Very well. Most of this post is being written on Friday morning, July 15 after a post-midnight showing. These are some of my immediate impressions. I make this point because, at the time of writing this, I don’t know when I will actually post this to my blog, but it will almost certainly be a week or so after the movie premieres. By then, I may not have the same thoughts and impressions, as I have from time to time been subject to more reasonable thinking after a period of reflection. For example, immediately after I saw Phantom Menace, I thought the movie was okay - maybe even pretty good. It was only after some intense reflection that I realized what a total crap bag that movie was and that I was in total denial because of my attachment to a franchise that had in many ways defined my childhood. I didn’t want to acknowledge that George Lucas was destroying everything good he had ever built. My full thoughts on George Lucas and the downfall of the Star Wars franchise are likely to be a post for another time, but I use this to illustrate that I have occasionally been subject to snap judgments on movies and later thought better of my initial opinions.
Harry Potter did not have the same impact on my imaginative development as Star Wars, and I have been painfully aware of the shortcomings of some of the Potter movies in the past. That said, this is still a series I have loved, and in some ways my reading the series as an adult (albeit a completely geeky adult) gave me greater objectivity than the childlike perspective I had in watching Luke, Leia, Han and Chewy long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. I would never elevate Harry over Han - the two franchises are just too different - but Potter had a lot to offer, even to a reader that was somewhat older than its target audience. This movie is the penultimate culmination of that series - the high-budget, visual telling of the final installment of a great novel that ended a great series of novels. I had high hopes, and that may color my comments some, so please take my review (and anyone else’s) with a grain of salt.
So, there’s that. Disclosures over. Let’s get to it.
This was probably the worst Potter movie of them all.
I realize what a bold statement that is. Any objective fan can recognize that many of the movies fell far, far short of the source material - a problem not at all uncommon for movies based on books. I make this bold statement with a caveat - it is the worst of the Potter films, all things considered. Order of the Phoenix was probably the most painful to watch overall, but it was based on the weakest of the books (in my opinion). In this, the eighth installment of the movie series, the directors and writers had some of the absolute best, most emotionally rending and iconic source material of the entire series. And they pissed it away.
I have to constrain my comments to a few key areas of the movie because otherwise I’d be here all day. First, there’s the significant rewrite that Voldemort is suddenly aware when he loses a Horcrux. Point of order: Why didn’t he notice when the amulet was destroyed in Part One of Deathly Hallows? Why didn’t he already know the Diary was gone? And Harry can hear horcruxes? Interesting. Okay, I guess I can accept that this twist at least reduces the amount of narrative explanation for how he finds the diadem (which was in the wrong place in the movie, btw - Rowling put it where it was for a reason). The confrontation between Snape and Harry immediately after he arrives at Hogwart’s is an obvious and incredibly awkward departure from the book, as is the fact that all of the member’s of Dumbledore’s Army, despite apparently living together in hiding in a secret room (that is not (!?) the room of requirement(!?)) are still active participants in the day to day goings on of Hogwarts? I’m sorry, what? Are we to believe they are in hiding at night, but go about unpunished to their daily classes? Or are they merely having a slumber party, complete with hammocks and representatives from three of the four houses in another common area of the castle, with Snape’s blessing?
I can forgive the minor departures, like Harry never going to Ravenclaw Tower, and Malfoy taking Crabbe and somebody other than Goyle (I guess the actor who previously played Goyle read the script and took a pass on this movie) into the Room of Requirement. Even the failure to utilize the Shrieking Shack in the final movie can be forgiven for the sake of expedience and moving the plot forward. But there are the big changes to be considered. The conversation between Harry, Hermione, and Ron before he leaves the castle for the woods was a huge, glaring error. I call it an error rather than a rewrite for a reason. Obviously this was another intentional departure from the book, but this is one which gets 180 degrees away from the underlying characters of all three of the primary heroes of this story. Harry intentionally avoids talking to his two friends in the books precisely because they would never, under any circumstances, let him go alone to face Voldemort. Here, Hermione pats him on the back with a few goodbye tears and Ron stands there looking like a lump on a log.
That brings up another problem - one which has nothing to do with the script. The three principles utterly failed to show up for most of this movie. Maybe they were emotionally exhausted - I know each of them is capable of decent acting, but you wouldn’t have known it here. The only actors who really seemed to try at all were the young men playing Neville and Draco whose names I am too lazy to check for on IMDB. Oh, and Alan Rickman in the Pensieve scenes, though I was somewhat disappointed with his performance elsewhere.
The piss-poor acting and bad editing decisions collided together into a black hole of suck in the scene in “King’s Cross Station.” In the book, this is maybe the most important scene in the entire series, explaining virtually everything that has not already been resolved, and bringing some emotional catharsis to Harry after spending so long wondering about the true character of his mentor, Dumbledore. Obviously, the studio, the directors, the writers, or someone made a decision to forego most of the major “is Dumbledore who we think he is?” subplot in Deathly Hallows: Part One (a gross miscalculation in my opinion), so a lot of that conversation would have made no sense if it were included in Part Two. Still, Harry meets his lost mentor again in this scene of the movie and we see them feeling.... nothing. This was the coldest, most mechanical scene of the entire movie and at the worst time imaginable. I never liked the replacement Dumbledore, but I thought after the sixth movie he might actually understand the character. Wow was I wrong. Or maybe he does understand the character, he just doesn’t bother to put forth much effort unless he gets at least thirty minutes of screen time. Also, minor note, but as long as I’m dissecting this scene - with that massive budget, was that the best visual background Warner Bros. could give us for King’s Cross? I expected something I couldn’t have designed with Photoshop, but I guess they needed the extra dinero to make Harry and Voldemort fly together later in a totally unnecessary ploy to rake in more bucks on the 3D showings.
The climactic battle was ripped into separate confrontations to stretch the drama, and that might have been okay if they didn’t screw up some of the major elements. In her fight with Bellatrix LeStrange, Mrs. Weasley comes off less like an angry mother defending her child than an incompetent witch who got in a lucky shot. The drama and intensity of the book were totally lost. Neville does come across like a warlock from Mars with fire breathing fists -as he should - but the rewrites ignore the primary effect of Harry’s big sacrifice - that Voldemort’s curses can no longer really hurt the people Harry sought to protect. That was kind of significant. Or maybe I’m the only one who thought so.
In the final battle between Harry and Voldemort, I just have to point out - the only reason their wands were able to lock together in that fashion previously was the twin cores. There’s a reason they don’t do that in the book version of Deathly Hallows. At this point in the story, neither one is using their original Phoenix feather wands (and don’t get me started on the failure by Harry to repair his original wand - that would have added maybe ten seconds to the movie?), so I’m guessing Warner Bros. never bothered to hire a consistency consultant.
My final beef - at least of those I plan to write about - is mostly just to point out some moral ambiguity that didn’t sit well with me. In the early scenes of the movie, the three heroes break into Gringott’s bank with Griphook the Goblin, and Imperius curse one of the senior goblins into being a cooperative git. In a departure from the books, that senior goblin is killed by the dragon in the vaults below the bank, primarily because he has been imperiused and is too stupid to get out of the way. None of our heroes seem terribly concerned about this, including Hermione who has spent the better part of seven books fighting against the oppression of other magical races by wizards. What? Didn’t occur to any of you that this particular innocent death was sort of your fault? Or have we just decided that goblins really are a lesser race?
Any one of these particular flaws standing alone could almost be forgiven. No movie is going to be 100% faithful to a book it is based on, and expecting that is unreasonable. Moreover, I am very aware that much must be sacrificed to make sure the story - the main story - moves forward at a reasonable pace. This was the second part of the final book and still clocks in at two hours plus, so asking for more is somewhat unreasonable. BUT, consider the example of The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) Trilogy. Peter Jackson had to cut a metric ton of source material in order to make three still extremely long movies. Despite the inconsistencies and omissions, LOTR still made a damn good movie series, and many people who never read the books have loved those movies. Potter, while being one of the best and most entertaining book series I’ve ever read, failed to come close in more than half of the movies. The vast majority of people have either read the books or are dragged by people who have read the books. And good thing - you would undoubtedly be completely lost if you hadn’t read the books beforehand.
I will say this for the final Harry Potter movie: it gave me what I wanted. Something still felt missing after reading the last book, like I wanted the story to go on a little bit more... or maybe it was simpler and I just knew there were a few more movies to come so it wasn’t really over until then. After seeing this, I know it’s really over, and while I may have to go read Deathly Hallows one more time to purge this experience from my memory, I don’t have any immediate need for something new from the Harry Potter Universe.
Harsh, I know. Feel free to leave your flaming feedback. It’s just my opinion.
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