The Experience:
Harry Potter managed to bring Jedis and Vulcans together in a 28-year-old schoolgirl-moderated and fluorescent-lit zoo at the local Regal cineplex. Costumes of all qualities and voices of equally-deafening volume made themselves inexorably noticeable. Having missed one of the many midnight showings, I bought a 3:05AM ticket instead. I'd actually expected to enjoy a relatively empty theatre, having taken the center back row chair, but it filled at the last minute. Two lovers on my left were silhouetted in a variety of nauseating perfumes while some game store clerk and little kid to my right were open-mouthed coughing and blowing their noses without any regard for the people in the row in front of them or those off to the side. Finally, five minutes into the end credits, some guy with a power blower shows up to blast Skittles, popcorn and other debris at record distances while succeeding in completely drowning out the music.
The Movie:
There is NO BIG BATTLE at Hogwarts. So if this is what you were hoping for, you're going to be disappointed and might as well skip the rest of this review.
I'm going to paraphrase Dumbledore: "If what you've just seen hasn't confused you I'd be surprised." No truer words were spoken. I tried to watch this movie under the perspective of someone who's neither read the books nor seen the movies. I don't think it's doable, and I gave up trying. So, where to start?
When the movie begins, Harry tries to hook up with this waitress, right? So a completely random scene designed to cut the time it would've taken Dumbledore to torment Harry's aunt and uncle ends up turning into its own time-consuming shot. Just when I began to wonder what I was watching, we're suddenly at his friend Ron's house. I was guessing at about this point that the film was going to rabidly jump from scene to loosely-connected scene with abrupt transition. Much attention is given to much needed and, for some, long overdue character development throughout the film, but I can't help but think that other parts suffered, and you'll read why...
Alright, you're about halfway through the movie when Harry, Ginny, Ron's dad and some werewolf are chasing bad guys through a cornfield. Did this actually happen in the book? I mean, the cornfield, the burning of the Weasley home and teasing the audience with the possibility of the death of Ron's mom? I could be wrong, but I think that was manufactured. So you get to see a really short wand battle. Afterwards, you can sit through more smooching and oh, boy! Dumbledore's fighting zombies and gets killed by Snape! At this point you're expecting to be in for the treat of the show. The big battle you read or heard about, right? Students, staff, ghosts, Hogwarts itself and members of the Order of the Phoenix doing battle with Voldemort's lackeys while they try to escape the castle and grounds. You remember reading about Hagrid the half-giant deflecting curses and breaking heads by his burning hut. Here it comes...it's going to happen, Snape just blasted someone out of the way...and they're out.
Huh? No, wait, they stopped at Hagrid's hut and set it on fire. Yes! No...where's Hagrid? Harry gets knocked down a couple of times and they're gone. Then everybody's standing around the corpse of Dumbledore and, as one, they point their wands into the air. Cut, go to the concluding wind-down scenes, and then roll credits. At this point it dawns on you that they just cut the big battle. WHAT JUST HAPPENED?! That's right, only Dumbledore gets killed in the movie's translation of the BIG BATTLE. Picture for a moment the first Star Wars movie. Imagine that you read a book it was based on and were expecting to see Red Squadron do battle with Darth Vader and his Tie Fighters. Instead, what you get is Luke Skywalker flying up to the Death Star alone and blowing it up with a single torpedo. No resistance encountered in or out. This is what I felt. There were no masses of wizards trying to kill or subdue one another. Warwick Davis wasn't even able to duel a Death Eater in the background.
You see, I recognize the need to cut material out of a book to fit into a feature film adaptation, but when you insert entirely new scenes that either steal time from action-packed scenes or add their own action in favor of the BIG BATTLE at the end of the story, you've just messed up. Critics who have taken off their beer goggles to write this movie up have commented on its anticlimactic nature, and I have to agree. The progression was fair enough and largely satisfying, but the climax was not. Potentially cool scenes like the BIG BATTLE at Hogwarts were thought better replaced by a small scuffle in the cornfield that's about a quarter off camera and a scene in the beginning of the movie with Harry Potter talking to a waitress. What were they thinking?
To summarize, HP 6 manages to capture the essence of the book, a tough feat given the runtime vs pages of potential script, but seems to get bored with the source material and invents some of its own out of thin air. This in turn displaces key scenes (key as in explaining to someone what is going on and following it up with a reasonable reaction). Even having read the book and listened to Jim Dale's reading I still had a hard time connecting some of the jumps from one scene to the next. It's making a lot of money and people will be seeing it anyway, but it's still no excuse.
I have so many mixed feelings on it that I've decided to rate it 6-9/10, depending on the part I watched, and 1/10 due to the fact that there was NO BIG BATTLE at Hogwarts.
