A Little Good, A Lot of Bad, and A Gargantuan Ugly

aka....a Review of Harry Potter 7 Part 2

-------WARNING-----

---THIS POST CONTAINS A TON OF MOVIE SPOILERS FOR HP 7 PART 2---

---IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS, DON'T READ THIS POST YET!---

Let me start out by saying that I am a HUGE fan of the Harry Potter books. I am one of the geeks who not only has hardback and paperback copies of all 7, but I also have all 7 audio books, which I listen to on a regular basis. This is part of the reason that road trips in excess of 20 hours don't bother me at all. And book 7 is my favorite. Between reading and listening, I've probably 'read' book 7 20 times. I am very familiar with it. So perhaps my view is a bit skewed and perhaps I am unable to objectively judge the film.

Yesterday, I awoke early enough to head out to the first showing of the day of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 at a local movie theatre. My thinking was that there wouldn't be too many people at an 8:45 am showing of this movie on a Saturday morning, and luckily I was right. I sat down and impatiently watched trailers for a bunch of movies that look bad, stupid, or like they were made simply to make money, and eagerly awaited the final part in the beloved Harry Potter series. The climax. The end. The final chapter that we stood in line at bookstores at midnight to find out. I thought this would be the best one of all. It SHOULD have been the best one of all. However.....I think it was the worst.

I'll start with the good points.

-Snape is wonderful. Snape's death and the memory sequence were beautifully done. They were tragic and sad and Alan Rickman was magnificent in the role. I cried. A lot.

-The poor tortured dragon in the depths of Gringotts was fantastically animated. They did a very good job of showing the emaciated, abused, sun-starved, blinded dragon and making it very organic and believable...I actually felt really bad for him.

-There were a few lines they added, like Professor McGonagall telling Molly Weasley "I've always wanted to use that spell" that were funny and charming and broke the tension nicely.

-The idea that Voldemort's voice was not magnified over the castle, but rather projected into every one's heads actually worked very well...it seems like something Voldemort would do and certainly makes him seem like an imminent threat.

-The protective bubble that the teachers create around the school is very well illustrated...more like a living membrane of magic than just a soap bubble, which I think is a wonderful example of the organic nature of magic, no matter what definition of magic you're using.

These are all pretty small things, by comparison, and are all short snippets of the film.


Now for the bad.
I realize some of these are nit-picky things, so I'll try to put them in order of least annoying to most.

-Olivander knows about the Hallows. I'm more ok with this than most of the other problems, since it occurs at the beginning of the film, and they're trying to remind the audience about the tale of the three brothers. It's inaccurate, but hardly a major problem.

-There is no Flagrante curse on the treasure in the Lestrange's vault, thus the only threat is that the treasure will expand, instead of also burning them.

-There is no enchanted cage for Nagini. I was kind of looking forward to seeing how they would do that.

-Cho appears as a student, even though she would have graduated the previous year.

-Apparently Neville is secretly in love with Luna? Since when!??

-They stab the diadem instead of it being destroyed in the Fiend Fire. Which is never described as Fiend Fire. A very minor detail that I'm pretty willing to overlook.

-There are far too many death eaters. It seems as though the CGI artists watched Lord of the Rings one too many times, and decided they needed an animated cast of thousands so the battle would seem bigger, instead of focusing on the individual elements and fights within the battle, which is part of what makes the battle so interesting in the book. It's the fact that we know the characters who are fighting, and to see the skill they've acquired in a war-like scenario is something we've never seen before, and thus, is interesting and exciting.

-The epilogue is very somber. There is no kidding around between Harry's children, which is the whole reason Albus Severus is worried about ending up in Slytheryn. There's no playful teasing between Ron and Hermione. More importantly, there doesn't seem to be any true happiness in anyone. It's kind of like everyone drank a bottle of NyQuil before shooting the scene.

-There is no evacuation of the students. The Slytheryns are simply all sent to the dungeon to be imprisoned during the battle.

-Luna is apparently friends with Helena Ravenclaw, the Gray Lady. The entire scene between Harry and Helena just seemed wrong. Then again, they had to get out of the situation they put themselves in in the 6th movie when they had Ginny hide the book in the room of requirement instead of Harry. Which is a situation they never should have been in to start with.

- They never say that it's Hufflepuff's cup. This is probably because they never showed the memory of Voldemort finding the cup and stealing it. In this regard, they started majorly screwing up in movie 6.

-They show Ron and Hermoine going down into the Chamber of Secrets to get the Basalisk fangs and stabbing Hufflepuff's cup. This is no problem with me. However, after it's over, they just randomly grab each other and kiss. It felt like they had to get the kiss in, but they didn't have any other place to put it, so they just stuck it in. It seemed very contrived and forced.

-Harry confronts Snape in the Great Hall in front of the whole school. This is just downright wrong. There's not much more I can say about this.

-Harry can 'hear' the the hoarcruxes. I guess they had to make up for the fact that in the movies, he knows so little about them that he has no other way to identify them. Personally, I found this a bit lame, not to mention kind of silly.

-Harry and Voldemort can both sense when a hoarcrux is destroyed. Again, this is just wrong.

-Voldemort faces come out of the hoarcruxes when they are destroyed. This is one of the many effects that seems to have been created simply because they decided to shoot this movie for 3-D, which was completely unnecessary and frequently caused things to not really make sense. Like the fabric coming off of Voldemort's robes to bind Harry. Like Nagini, Bellatrix and Voldemort exploding when they die. Not in the book. Totally unnecessary...only there for cool 3-D effects. What's interesting about the faces specifically is that they didn't do that effect when they destroyed the locket in 7 part 1, thus making part 2 inconsistent with part 1.

-Having Harry and Voldemort's final battle be just the two of them, instead of in front of the whole wizarding world really bothered me. The whole point of the 8 pages of Harry belittling and insulting Voldemort in front of everyone, calling him Riddle, telling him to try for some degree of remorse for all the evil that he's done, this is all very important to Harry's ultimate story of becoming a man, being stronger than Voldemort, being the true champion for the Wizarding World and truly accepting his position as the one who has to kill Voldemort. That was all missing. It was just the two of them, and after it was all over, there was no celebration. He walks back through the Great Hall, with pretty much everyone ignoring him, just chatting to each other like they're having Sunday afternoon tea. Everything is so slow and sedate and somber. Not like they're mourning their dead even. More like they really just don't care about what has happened. Like it has no effect on them.


Now for the Gargantuan Ugly

-This movie felt like an insult to fans of the book. It may be an ok movie if all you know is the movies, although I've been told by friends who haven't read the books that it felt a little anticlimactic. But as a fan of the books, I was really looking forward to the final book's movies. I couldn't wait to see Harry finally confront Voldemort and win and to see the celebration and the joy that followed such a momentous occasion. I was excited to see the reactions of the crowd when they saw what was happening and the look on Dumbledore's face as he beamed down at Harry from his portrait after Harry has finally won the war. I was eager to be on the edge of my seat, even though I knew how it would work out, waiting to cheer when good finally conquered evil and all was right with the wizarding world again. And they threw all of that out the window and made up their own ending. This is supposed to be the climax for the entire series...all 8 movies...the whole she-bang. And they blew it. I truly feel that had they gotten the last 15 minutes of the movie right, all could have been forgiven for earlier discrepancies. But they didn't. It felt as if they didn't even really try. It's kind of like instead of blowing up the Death Star and the Ewoks celebrating, they made it simply fade into the distance and the Ewoks went back to doing laundry. It's just wrong on so many levels that it shouldn't even have been done. It killed the tension. They should have had the audience cheering at the end, instead of yawning as they leave the theater asking their 9 year old son who looks like he just woke up if he wants to go bowling.

And there was no reason for it. All they had to do was go by the book. Everything was written for them, from the feel of the story to the motivation for the characters, from the script to the set decoration. It was already there and it was already perfect. And they threw it out of the window and told their own way. Which means it's not really Harry Potter.

More than anything else, I'm just so disappointed by it. 7 part 1 was actually pretty good, and although a little different from the book, pretty faithful by movie standards, and it set up part 2 very well. I didn't expect to be disappointed that much. I expected to get goosebumps and chills and to cry when Fred died and to cheer and dance in the aisles when Harry finally wins.

And I didn't.

Did you?