Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince Review
I’m impressed with the hold Harry Potter has on movie audiences. Last night as I walked out of the theatre, I noticed a lot of tired faces. This was not a movie with a clear beginning, middle and end. This was not a feel-good movie either. Or a Christmas movie, although in years to come I’m sure it will turn into an annual December-time marathon in my household. This is a “middle arch movie”, to fill in the story for people who have not read the books. What I think audiences are hungry for now, is the finish. The end of Harry Potter’s story, with the closure that entails, has yet to be delivered. Last night, the audience’s reactions reminded me of the Greeks who would travel miles to experience the catharsis of the epic journey of a hero once a year.
Although the Harry Potter saga is something of an epic in the most classical sense for modern audiences, the movies are starting to fail me a little by giving peripheral plot aspects undue screentime. I’m kind of short on patience for the magical delight both we and Harry are supposed to get from watching Dumbledore restore a ransacked room to it’s original state, a la Disney’s ‘Fantasia’. You’d think after six years of living in a magical school, training to be a wizard, and fighting mano a mano with Voldemort would jade him a bit. (It’s jaded me!) And what’s more, after fixing the room and establishing no one would stay in it for longer than a week, they leave a minute later. Instead of spending time cramming the six memories of Tom Riddle that Harry explores in the book, only two are shown. And while this is the book where hormones start really raging for the teenagers, in this movie it overshadows and diminishes the dark and disruptive forces of the Death Eaters, who are threatening wizards and muggles now, indiscriminately. We never even find out why Ollivander’s Wand Shop is destroyed.
Overall, the Harry Potter movies are turning out to be the Cliff Notes of the real thing, or the Ladybird versions of a classic. As with Hermione’s Time Turner in ‘The Prisoner of Azkaban’, the curiosity towards the “Who is the Half-Blood Prince?” mystery itself was not fully captured the way it drove our attention in the book, and that leaves me with a slightly unfulfilled feeling about this movie. The next and final installment(s) of the series will be sure to provide some much needed catharsis for viewers simply by including the final chapter of the book and bringing peace to our hero, Harry. But I can’t help but hope that once this business is all over and done with, they’ll start making a movie series of the book, for real this time.
As a side note, I’m intrigued that they showed the exact location of Diagon Alley for once! I wonder if the City of Westminster will add a commemorative English Heritage blue plaque?
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Tags: harry potter epic, harry potter greek tragedy, harry potter half blood prince review, harry potter movie review, movie review
July 16th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
It’s interesting how you point out that this movie had no real beginning, middle or end. I know all of the books are connected, thus the movies should be, but I assume the books each have their own arc that allows them to stand on their own as well. Each movie has had that arc until now. This seemed like filler (”Harry Potter 5 1/2″, more like). Let’s hope their choice to turn the last book into 2 films gives them more time to work in the fun and adventure, rather than Cliff Notes, as you say, and some added filler. Nice review