Love in a time of dragon pox: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie review
Let me say this: Half-Blood Prince is every bit as awesome and as awful as you've heard. It's important you note that there are good points and bad, and that someone who hasn't read the books is more likely to see the positive, whereas somebody like me, who has read every book well over ten times (some of them as many as sixty, and no, I am not exaggerating or kidding - the Three Year Summer between books four and five was long, after all!), will readily list the inaccuracies and faults. Half-Blood Prince was riddled with them. I'm quite harsh on it because of that, and I feel guilty, because I loved the movie anyway. As you're reading what I have to say, remember that: I still love this movie, just as I love the books, albeit differently. I still enjoyed it and will enjoy it many times more. Along with the bad, it was rife with truly hilarious moments, some cute and fuzzy scenes, and emotional brooding and conflict that made me bite my lip to hold back tears. That, and it's a beautifully shot film. Apart from some rather sloppy transitions, I can't quibble with the cinematography. Hogwarts is truly resplendent in this movie.
I had mixed feelings about Half-Blood Prince, going in. I know the beginning, middle, and the end by heart, and Half-Blood Prince has consistently been the book in the series that troubles me and leaves me feeling sapped and disturbed when I've read it. It is always the book on which I get hung up, but at the end, I slingshot back and absolutely must proceed and read on to Deathly Hallows. I say this so you know my background on the book and my feelings about it. I find it a tough book to read, so understandably I was a bit distraught, down inside my excitement, to see the film. The white tomb and the flight of the phoenix are hard facts to face.
The first scenes set the pace for the whole movie. First, we're treated to Muggles seeing the Dark Mark form in the clouds, and the black wisps of Apparating Death Eaters shooting through the sky like antimatter meteors. Then, in a café, we find Mr. Potter: apparently, he's not just our new celebrity, but one in the Muggle world, too. Or at least he is in the mind of a waitress with whom he shares some awkward, yet funny, flirtation. I raised my eyebrows immediately because - surprise! - that doesn't happen in the books. We're thrown right into the action with Dumbledore and are given a good look at his mangled, blackened hand, but I think the movie could have handled this better and made it clearer that Dumbledore isn't just fooling around. This is serious stuff, and Harry's more worried about whether he'll make it back for his date. Cut that out, David Yates. Voldemort versus dating. Who will win out as Harry's priority? Honestly, it turns out to be the dating.
I found the relatively quick pace easy to follow. The movie has to whip through tons of scenes, six hundred pages' worth of book, so I pardon it if some scenes are a bit rushed, and if others take slightly longer because the movie is trying to be self-sufficient and explain itself. One handful of scenes that took a perfect amount of time are the scenes in the cave. The dark, creepy atmosphere that pervaded in the sky over Muggle London at the beginning of the movie is present here, too, and the danger is so thick, you couldn't bleed it out with Sectumsempra even if you wanted to. That's one great thing about Half-Blood Prince: when it needs to, it puts on the pallor and adopts the grim, ominous air that a movie about brewing wartime and creeping evil must have. Lighting is used to great effect, and the whole thing looks brilliant. I particularly love a shot of Hogwarts that drifts from the golden glow behind tower windows to a balcony bearing a miserable, burdened Draco. Really beautiful work there, and a great way to show what's going on with Draco and his deadly plotting while the rest of the castle is trying to get on with life.
But as I mentioned before, there were a few awkward transitions. One bit at the end, with Hermione and Harry discussing Dumbledore's demise rapidly becoming a conversation about Harry's relationship with Ginny, comes to mind. It simply does not follow. There's another bit, in which the bonfire formerly known as the Burrow transforms into a scene of a joyful, untroubled Ron fooling around with his girlfriend, Lavender. The words traumatic destruction of childhood home and all earthly possessions and monumental threat of attacking Death Eaters should mean something to Ron, and to our director, but whatever. Ron clearly just needs a snog and it'll all be better. The same can be said for every character in this movie. An admirable amount of time is spent showing Draco brooding and worrying over his orders from Voldemort, and Professor Slughorn's refusal to paint himself as a black hat (unintentional, but still, he gave the number one most vital bit of information to the once and future King of Evil) and admit a horrible mistake. A less admirable amount of time is spent showing Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and friends brooding and worrying over whether they should kiss and make up or fight and break up. Excuse me while I vomit.
I said to Mike/tsallme after leaving the theatre that my biggest complaints are inaccuracy and the movie's focus on lightheartedness and romance rather than on ferreting out answers and learning the truth about not only Voldemort, but the Half-Blood Prince. In the movie, Harry hardly seems to question who the Prince is, and Hermione gets about two lines - brief ones - telling him how dangerous the Prince is, as opposed to constant harping and nagging in the book. I think it wouldn't be much to ask to include some more whinging from Hermione about Harry's foolishness, rather than tears and breakdowns over Won-Won and Lav-Lav. So it's anticlimactic when Snape reveals himself as the Half-Blood Prince. It would be dull, too, except that Alan Rickman is 1) delicious and 2) incredibly talented, so he pulls the confession off with aplomb and leaves Harry on his back, fingers twitching, eyes to the sky. It's another great scene that looks just plain cool. But the motivation behind it is weak, since we haven't been focusing on the Prince and his spells throughout the film. We haven't formed that attachment to the Half-Blood Prince that Harry does form in the book, and we haven't had our trust betrayed because there was no trust to begin with. I can't even properly explain how frustrating that is for me.
As for the focus on the romance, well, I think you can already see what I think of that. I much preferred bits with Draco and the Vanishing Cabinet. While not strictly canon, that's the kind of loose interpretation that I can deal with, because it explores a character and doesn't change him from the way he's depicted in the books. We see Draco being cowardly. We see him panic about what he's trying to do. We see him make mistakes. All we see of Harry and Ron is blundering and egotism. In Harry's case, he recovers in the second half of the movie. Not so much in Ron's case. At least Hermione is better realized. The Ron's head vs. Hermione's birds scene comes to mind. It looks amazing. It's well-acted. It's funny, if you're not busy feeling badly for Hermione's broken heart. Could a whole movie be based off this and come off looking and feeling like a Harry Potter movie? No.
The focus needed to be on two major mysteries: 1) the Voldemort issue, and how he became what he is, which leads to how to defeat him forever; and 2) the identity of the Half-Blood Prince, whom Harry comes to regard as a friend over the course of the story. Neither of these seemed terribly important in the movie. The former was far more important than the latter, and yes, it should've been. But there was no Hepzibah and no Merope. The Pensieve scenes that did appear in the movie were lovely, and Hero Fiennes-Tiffin was chilling as the little boy Tom Riddle. Tom asking Slughorn about Horcruxes was done extremely well, though I would have liked more discussion of it between Dumbledore and Harry, and more about Horcruxes in the movie. Considering how important they are, I was surprised that after that revelation, Harry hardly seemed to suffer any moment of consuming concern about them. True, in the book, he was occupied with thoughts of Ginny, but the pressing presence of evil was there. It was lurking. Harry knew it, we knew it, and the movie gives that feeling of danger, but somehow it felt less explained. Anyway, the Pensieve scenes were tremendous. I liked the melting, ink-dropped-into-water appearance given the Pensieve memories as they filled the screen. I loved the greenish, almost teal, cast to some of the memories; I loved the eerie, nearly waxy perfection of teenage Tom Riddle's face, foreshadowing the melted monster he becomes as an adult. So much of the movie is so visually good that it's more jarring to see things like a ring of fire surrounding the Weasleys' house, because although it looks cool, it's not what happened - or it's not portrayed as it should be.
I must say that my favorites in this movie were Hermione, if only for the bird scene and her candid conversations with Harry - though their friendship seemed to kick Ron to the curb and downplay the Harry-Ron relationship - and Dumbledore. I adored Dumbledore. I thought he should have gotten far more screen time (as should many other characters, but Dumbledore especially). This is his chance to shine, his last hurrah, and his last hurrah was brilliant. That scene in particular had me quivering in anticipation and jittering. My heart raced. Michael Gambon truly did shine. Tom Felton did justice to Draco's last-minute cowardice and hint of good beneath the bad. Even Helena Bonham-Carter, of whom I'm not a fan (nor do I like her character; in fact, I hate and loathe and despise Bellatrix, and I hate and loathe and despise fandom's preoccupation with her), was perfect in that last of Dumbledore's living scenes. The tension and the spark were definitely present as Dumbledore left the building. I burst into tears as Harry ran to Dumbledore's side at the base of the lightning-struck tower, and kept crying through what was left of the movie. Harry brushing hair out of Dumbledore's face, as if waiting for him to wake up, was the saddest moment in any of the Harry Potter movies yet. It broke my heart.
The Harry-Dumbledore interactions made up for a lot of the bad in this movie, and you may not believe me because of the canon nitpicking I've been doing, but I suggest you go see the movie for yourself to make up your mind - and to see Harry and Dumbledore form a friendship, an almost familial relationship, that affects Harry deeply, and shapes him as a person. Though it would have been even more affecting and tragic if we had seen more of Dumbledore, and watched him talk with Harry and plot together as they do in the book, nothing can detract from what the movie does show. It shows a lot. It shows Harry eager to please and to help Dumbledore, no matter the cost, and Dumbledore feeling guilty for dragging Harry into a frightening endeavor. It shows Harry maturing at the crux of the action, then falling back into his role as a terrified little boy when he sees this man he loves so much being killed by a person that man trusted. It shows Dumbledore not paralyzed by responsibility, but catalyzed, and forced to make difficult decisions. I admire that I felt all those things as I was watching the movie, because that's effective storytelling and certainly fantastic acting.
If you've read the books and you're a stickler for canon, you'll probably pick at it just as I have, and find parts of Half-Blood Prince wanting. You'll likely find yourself annoyed as you watch it, wondering what the writers and director were thinking as they decided to shoot this scene or cut one that might have been better. You'll also find yourself wringing your hands, or feeling your heartstrings plucked to the beat of Harry's own heart as he stumbles to his mentor's side. You'll find yourself pitying poor Hermione that she has to watch Ron drift away from her, and wanting to grab Ron and shake some sense into him. You'll find yourself siding with Harry, wanting him to succeed, hoping everything works out for him, and crashing to the ground when everything goes horribly and he can't seem to pick up the pieces. This is his story, after all. Harry is the hero, and Half-Blood Prince succeeded in making me cheer for him and want to squeeze him close and never let him go. That's one of its triumphs.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: half-baked in places and princely in others...? (Okay, sorry, sorry, I won't try to play on the title again - or not so poorly, anyway.) Often flippant in the face of Harry's dark fate and the unhappy task before him, frequently quite funny, and overall a beautifully-shot film with great acting, but an unfortunate choice of focus and target. It's not the best Harry Potter movie. For me, that honor goes to Prisoner of Azkaban, or to Goblet of Fire. But it's not the worst, either. I'm sad that it wasn't the best so far, because at the time, the book was (can't decide which book is my favorite of all seven, to this day). The book was terrific. I know, I know, the movie isn't the book. As a movie on its own, with less of that book-adaptation aspect, it's glorious and awesome. I'd love to see it again and take it less seriously, just enjoy it as a movie and have laughs at all the jokes. I guarantee you I will see it about a million times, too, just like the other films, and it'll spark a new wave of Pottermania in me and in others, and it's been a few months since I read my HP books, so the reentry into my life isn't an unwelcome one.
"A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get."
Another sure sign of a good book is that you see the movie based off it and love that movie in spite of its flaws, simply for telling its own version of the events in the book.
I had mixed feelings about Half-Blood Prince, going in. I know the beginning, middle, and the end by heart, and Half-Blood Prince has consistently been the book in the series that troubles me and leaves me feeling sapped and disturbed when I've read it. It is always the book on which I get hung up, but at the end, I slingshot back and absolutely must proceed and read on to Deathly Hallows. I say this so you know my background on the book and my feelings about it. I find it a tough book to read, so understandably I was a bit distraught, down inside my excitement, to see the film. The white tomb and the flight of the phoenix are hard facts to face.
The first scenes set the pace for the whole movie. First, we're treated to Muggles seeing the Dark Mark form in the clouds, and the black wisps of Apparating Death Eaters shooting through the sky like antimatter meteors. Then, in a café, we find Mr. Potter: apparently, he's not just our new celebrity, but one in the Muggle world, too. Or at least he is in the mind of a waitress with whom he shares some awkward, yet funny, flirtation. I raised my eyebrows immediately because - surprise! - that doesn't happen in the books. We're thrown right into the action with Dumbledore and are given a good look at his mangled, blackened hand, but I think the movie could have handled this better and made it clearer that Dumbledore isn't just fooling around. This is serious stuff, and Harry's more worried about whether he'll make it back for his date. Cut that out, David Yates. Voldemort versus dating. Who will win out as Harry's priority? Honestly, it turns out to be the dating.
I found the relatively quick pace easy to follow. The movie has to whip through tons of scenes, six hundred pages' worth of book, so I pardon it if some scenes are a bit rushed, and if others take slightly longer because the movie is trying to be self-sufficient and explain itself. One handful of scenes that took a perfect amount of time are the scenes in the cave. The dark, creepy atmosphere that pervaded in the sky over Muggle London at the beginning of the movie is present here, too, and the danger is so thick, you couldn't bleed it out with Sectumsempra even if you wanted to. That's one great thing about Half-Blood Prince: when it needs to, it puts on the pallor and adopts the grim, ominous air that a movie about brewing wartime and creeping evil must have. Lighting is used to great effect, and the whole thing looks brilliant. I particularly love a shot of Hogwarts that drifts from the golden glow behind tower windows to a balcony bearing a miserable, burdened Draco. Really beautiful work there, and a great way to show what's going on with Draco and his deadly plotting while the rest of the castle is trying to get on with life.
But as I mentioned before, there were a few awkward transitions. One bit at the end, with Hermione and Harry discussing Dumbledore's demise rapidly becoming a conversation about Harry's relationship with Ginny, comes to mind. It simply does not follow. There's another bit, in which the bonfire formerly known as the Burrow transforms into a scene of a joyful, untroubled Ron fooling around with his girlfriend, Lavender. The words traumatic destruction of childhood home and all earthly possessions and monumental threat of attacking Death Eaters should mean something to Ron, and to our director, but whatever. Ron clearly just needs a snog and it'll all be better. The same can be said for every character in this movie. An admirable amount of time is spent showing Draco brooding and worrying over his orders from Voldemort, and Professor Slughorn's refusal to paint himself as a black hat (unintentional, but still, he gave the number one most vital bit of information to the once and future King of Evil) and admit a horrible mistake. A less admirable amount of time is spent showing Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and friends brooding and worrying over whether they should kiss and make up or fight and break up. Excuse me while I vomit.
I said to Mike/tsallme after leaving the theatre that my biggest complaints are inaccuracy and the movie's focus on lightheartedness and romance rather than on ferreting out answers and learning the truth about not only Voldemort, but the Half-Blood Prince. In the movie, Harry hardly seems to question who the Prince is, and Hermione gets about two lines - brief ones - telling him how dangerous the Prince is, as opposed to constant harping and nagging in the book. I think it wouldn't be much to ask to include some more whinging from Hermione about Harry's foolishness, rather than tears and breakdowns over Won-Won and Lav-Lav. So it's anticlimactic when Snape reveals himself as the Half-Blood Prince. It would be dull, too, except that Alan Rickman is 1) delicious and 2) incredibly talented, so he pulls the confession off with aplomb and leaves Harry on his back, fingers twitching, eyes to the sky. It's another great scene that looks just plain cool. But the motivation behind it is weak, since we haven't been focusing on the Prince and his spells throughout the film. We haven't formed that attachment to the Half-Blood Prince that Harry does form in the book, and we haven't had our trust betrayed because there was no trust to begin with. I can't even properly explain how frustrating that is for me.
As for the focus on the romance, well, I think you can already see what I think of that. I much preferred bits with Draco and the Vanishing Cabinet. While not strictly canon, that's the kind of loose interpretation that I can deal with, because it explores a character and doesn't change him from the way he's depicted in the books. We see Draco being cowardly. We see him panic about what he's trying to do. We see him make mistakes. All we see of Harry and Ron is blundering and egotism. In Harry's case, he recovers in the second half of the movie. Not so much in Ron's case. At least Hermione is better realized. The Ron's head vs. Hermione's birds scene comes to mind. It looks amazing. It's well-acted. It's funny, if you're not busy feeling badly for Hermione's broken heart. Could a whole movie be based off this and come off looking and feeling like a Harry Potter movie? No.
The focus needed to be on two major mysteries: 1) the Voldemort issue, and how he became what he is, which leads to how to defeat him forever; and 2) the identity of the Half-Blood Prince, whom Harry comes to regard as a friend over the course of the story. Neither of these seemed terribly important in the movie. The former was far more important than the latter, and yes, it should've been. But there was no Hepzibah and no Merope. The Pensieve scenes that did appear in the movie were lovely, and Hero Fiennes-Tiffin was chilling as the little boy Tom Riddle. Tom asking Slughorn about Horcruxes was done extremely well, though I would have liked more discussion of it between Dumbledore and Harry, and more about Horcruxes in the movie. Considering how important they are, I was surprised that after that revelation, Harry hardly seemed to suffer any moment of consuming concern about them. True, in the book, he was occupied with thoughts of Ginny, but the pressing presence of evil was there. It was lurking. Harry knew it, we knew it, and the movie gives that feeling of danger, but somehow it felt less explained. Anyway, the Pensieve scenes were tremendous. I liked the melting, ink-dropped-into-water appearance given the Pensieve memories as they filled the screen. I loved the greenish, almost teal, cast to some of the memories; I loved the eerie, nearly waxy perfection of teenage Tom Riddle's face, foreshadowing the melted monster he becomes as an adult. So much of the movie is so visually good that it's more jarring to see things like a ring of fire surrounding the Weasleys' house, because although it looks cool, it's not what happened - or it's not portrayed as it should be.
I must say that my favorites in this movie were Hermione, if only for the bird scene and her candid conversations with Harry - though their friendship seemed to kick Ron to the curb and downplay the Harry-Ron relationship - and Dumbledore. I adored Dumbledore. I thought he should have gotten far more screen time (as should many other characters, but Dumbledore especially). This is his chance to shine, his last hurrah, and his last hurrah was brilliant. That scene in particular had me quivering in anticipation and jittering. My heart raced. Michael Gambon truly did shine. Tom Felton did justice to Draco's last-minute cowardice and hint of good beneath the bad. Even Helena Bonham-Carter, of whom I'm not a fan (nor do I like her character; in fact, I hate and loathe and despise Bellatrix, and I hate and loathe and despise fandom's preoccupation with her), was perfect in that last of Dumbledore's living scenes. The tension and the spark were definitely present as Dumbledore left the building. I burst into tears as Harry ran to Dumbledore's side at the base of the lightning-struck tower, and kept crying through what was left of the movie. Harry brushing hair out of Dumbledore's face, as if waiting for him to wake up, was the saddest moment in any of the Harry Potter movies yet. It broke my heart.
The Harry-Dumbledore interactions made up for a lot of the bad in this movie, and you may not believe me because of the canon nitpicking I've been doing, but I suggest you go see the movie for yourself to make up your mind - and to see Harry and Dumbledore form a friendship, an almost familial relationship, that affects Harry deeply, and shapes him as a person. Though it would have been even more affecting and tragic if we had seen more of Dumbledore, and watched him talk with Harry and plot together as they do in the book, nothing can detract from what the movie does show. It shows a lot. It shows Harry eager to please and to help Dumbledore, no matter the cost, and Dumbledore feeling guilty for dragging Harry into a frightening endeavor. It shows Harry maturing at the crux of the action, then falling back into his role as a terrified little boy when he sees this man he loves so much being killed by a person that man trusted. It shows Dumbledore not paralyzed by responsibility, but catalyzed, and forced to make difficult decisions. I admire that I felt all those things as I was watching the movie, because that's effective storytelling and certainly fantastic acting.
If you've read the books and you're a stickler for canon, you'll probably pick at it just as I have, and find parts of Half-Blood Prince wanting. You'll likely find yourself annoyed as you watch it, wondering what the writers and director were thinking as they decided to shoot this scene or cut one that might have been better. You'll also find yourself wringing your hands, or feeling your heartstrings plucked to the beat of Harry's own heart as he stumbles to his mentor's side. You'll find yourself pitying poor Hermione that she has to watch Ron drift away from her, and wanting to grab Ron and shake some sense into him. You'll find yourself siding with Harry, wanting him to succeed, hoping everything works out for him, and crashing to the ground when everything goes horribly and he can't seem to pick up the pieces. This is his story, after all. Harry is the hero, and Half-Blood Prince succeeded in making me cheer for him and want to squeeze him close and never let him go. That's one of its triumphs.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: half-baked in places and princely in others...? (Okay, sorry, sorry, I won't try to play on the title again - or not so poorly, anyway.) Often flippant in the face of Harry's dark fate and the unhappy task before him, frequently quite funny, and overall a beautifully-shot film with great acting, but an unfortunate choice of focus and target. It's not the best Harry Potter movie. For me, that honor goes to Prisoner of Azkaban, or to Goblet of Fire. But it's not the worst, either. I'm sad that it wasn't the best so far, because at the time, the book was (can't decide which book is my favorite of all seven, to this day). The book was terrific. I know, I know, the movie isn't the book. As a movie on its own, with less of that book-adaptation aspect, it's glorious and awesome. I'd love to see it again and take it less seriously, just enjoy it as a movie and have laughs at all the jokes. I guarantee you I will see it about a million times, too, just like the other films, and it'll spark a new wave of Pottermania in me and in others, and it's been a few months since I read my HP books, so the reentry into my life isn't an unwelcome one.
"A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get."
Another sure sign of a good book is that you see the movie based off it and love that movie in spite of its flaws, simply for telling its own version of the events in the book.