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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