Film: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

[liv]

Reasons for watching it: Harry Potter has become a huge cultural touchstone, so I sort of want to know how the story goes. But when it came to the books I got bored somewhere in the middle of Goblet of fire and couldn't quite bring myself to plough through the remaining increasingly bloated tomes. And I didn't really want to get a pedantic plot summary from Wikipedia, because that wouldn't give me a clear enough impression of the series. So I said to myself that I'd watch the final episode when it came out on film. Obviously with it being such a huge thing, it was going to be a big-budget film with good actors and good special effects, and since I don't love the books I wouldn't be offended by changes or abridgements.

Circumstances of watching it: My colleague SL suggested a trip to the cinema to see it, so I was happy to go along. It's the kind of thing that likely benefits from the big screen, and for once I get to keep up with the cultural zeitgeist rather than waiting a few years until it comes out on DVD and I get round to watching it.

Verdict: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is generally a romp and I'm glad I managed to catch it.

It certainly made for a decent couple of hours' entertainment. Being the climax of the series it's undoubtedly an exciting story (and I'd picked up enough cues from general culture that I knew what was going on even though I haven't read all the books). The big budget visual effects worked very well (I particularly liked the scenes in Gringotts vaults, and the dragon!) I'm really impressed that they've kept the same three main actors for the whole ten-year series; a lot can happen when child actors go through puberty and it's great that you've got this ongoing depth of characterization rather than swapping them out for actors who might look more like the glossy Hollywood ideal. That said, both Hermione and Harry are too "pretty" for the roles, which was a complaint from the beginning but it's particularly noticeable now that you have mid-20s actors playing 18-year-olds.

The adults are of course superb. Dumbledore and McGonagall aren't quite how I imagined them, but the film versions are still lovely. Rickman is magnificent as Snape, which is no surprise at all but he's still a joy to watch. I also got a lot out of the way Voldemort was done as an antagonist. Yes, he's a total cliche melodramatic villain, but that's a problem with the books as much as anything, and the film made him genuinely creepy and scary. His defeat doesn't involve him being stupid or wasting time by gloating, like a lot of melodrama villains. I also loved the big set-piece scene where the Death Eaters army attacks Hogwarts; it's really visually and emotionally impressive, and in spite of the epic scale it really brings home the emotions of characters watching their beloved school destroyed and many of their friends killed. Neville's moment of triumph was also well handled (the fact you could see it coming from book 1 was again a problem with the books).

I didn't like the epilogue, but then I generally don't like epilogues, and likely a big part of my problem is that I just do not in any way buy Ron/Hermione. (Also it usually takes two red-headed parents to produce true red-head offspring, but you know, that's a minor quibble.) The other aspect of the film that didn't sit well with me was the Draco Malfoy arc. I suppose the truth is that I just like fanfic!Draco much better than canon!Draco. He really could have been a complex character damaged by his upbringing by, effectively, neo-Nazis, but it seems that Rowling panicked so much about fandom seeing complexities that she hadn't intended, that she made him more and more of a cardboard racist bully character as the series went on.

So all in all it's a great piece of storytelling which really uses the capabilities of the medium. The story it's based on undoubtedly has flaws, but I think the film managed to capture the part of the series that really touches something primal.

Comments

[ajollypyruvate]

I quit the series after the 5th book, as I found her habit of spending pages and pages on re-capping (which I considered insulting to the intelligence of the age-group for whom these were written) and the ALL CAPS FOR ALL COMMUNICATION WHEN PEOPLE ARE UPSET WITH EACH OTHER, instead of using, say, "shouted angrily" or similar.

I also didn't see any of the movies after the second one, except when G. took me to the ILM screening of Goblet of Fire, where I instantly disliked the new Dumbledore. So I gave up.

But now enough people have said they enjoyed the last two to cause me to re-think my stance and I'll start hunting these out at the library.

"...likely a big part of my problem is that I just do not in any way buy Ron/Hermione."
I saw that one coming from the first book and I rather like the pairing. :p

[liv]

The weird thing about Rowling is that on the sentence level she really can't write, her adverbs and her dialogue are just awful. I don't think she became popular because people inexplicably prefer bad books to good ones, though! I think it's something about the way she does plot. Obviously after a while the popularity has its own momentum, people read HP because everybody else they know is reading it, and because of the films and the clever marketing with a load of hype about the release date. But in the early days, before the hype machine kicked in, there must have been something that caused everybody to recommend the books so highly and something that let them escape from the kidlit market and reach adult readers.

I didn't realize they had changed the actor playing Dumbledore. I think in some ways I got more out of the film because I'm not a diehard fan, it was just a fun bit of entertainment for me. And DH2 is unquestionably a good, entertaining film.

I think the thing with Ron/Hermione is that I tend to react against "they fight all the time, so it must be true love" as a trope. It can work if it's amazingly well written (the Beatrice / Benedict thing in Much Ado about Nothing, for example), but otherwise it just grates for me.

[leora]

I assumed they were popular mainly because she crafted an engaging world people want to explore. It's got magic and wizards, magical creatures, and a mish-mash of lots of legends. Hogwarts is a nicely described place that is interesting. In the early books, many people really wanted to learn more about the wizarding world and how it worked. That's a good hook. It gives you something to daydream about.

That said, I read all of the books, and I really wish book five had had significantly better editing. It was badly bloated. But I still found a lot of the books to be fun. But I wouldn't call them must-reads.

[liv]

That makes sense. I think the author that Rowling is most like is probably Enid Blyton, she has a similar sense of imagination and ability to create fun worlds to explore, enough like our world that children who don't read a lot of fantasy can relate to them, but magical enough to be interesting. And similarly wildly popular even though not a particularly great writer on a technical level. I do think it's a shame that JKR got too famous to need an editor, yeah, because some of the later books in the series really could have done with some pruning.