Chrisno1's Long Overdue Assessment of Harry Potter
chrisno1
LondonPosts: 3,645MI6 Agent
Okay, so I could have dropped this into the 'Last Movie Watched' thread, but I like the eclectic mix of movies we drum up over there and frankly, well, this is a bit of a niche market.
Maybe my ego is talking to me as well...
I've not watched these movies since the early 2000s. I don't even think I made it to the end. Maybe on television some time. Anyway, ITV annually repeats the whole series here in the UK and they've just started all over again, eight over eight days, I believe. This is serious commitment. Watching Harry Potter tends to become something of a marathon whether you watch one or all eight. As I'm not working this week, a good excuse to record and watch - I skip add breaks that way - and keep myself out of mischief. Although I am planning to catch Bond this week also. Which might just bring me thumping back to earth after all this wizardry.
Anyhow, this is my take on Harry Potter 1...
HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE (2001)
I have to confess, first off, I have not read the novels. When I worked in a book store the first three adventures had been published to some acclaim. They were thin volumes with cheeky looking covers, featuring flying cars, puffing trains and a boy with glasses. The fourth book was a doorstep of immense proportions, I thought, especially for children. It was probably one of the biggest selling books I ever had to deal with. Huge sales don’t persuade me to read anything, and to this day the printed form of J.K. Rowling’s hero has never darkened my door.
So what of the debut movie? Released in 2001, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone holds up remarkably well. It’s hard to believe the film is over twenty years old. It’s a colourful, enthusiastic, undemanding experience. The film blends suspense with humour and a little icky-some gore, introduces its characters effectively and rarely pauses for breath despite a running time of 2½ hours. Given I am not fond of the fantasy genre – I do science fiction, but fantasy usually leaves me cold – I am genuinely impressed by the efforts of director Chris Columbus and the raft of producers, headed by David Heyman, to provide such a vibrant product. Thanks to them and their production crews, a fully realised parallel universe of wizards and wizardry is allowed to unfold on the screen. It enchants the audience – kids in particular – and isn’t myopic enough to forget the adults or young teens who might be watching, allowing a strain of clever, if obvious, self-mocking humour to abound. It’s also smart enough to deliver the fantasy elements in a robust manner. There are moments of tension, but they are inserted at clearly delineated moments, so the audience anticipates them without the prerequisite ‘jump’. As these suspenseful segments pass, they are quelled by gentle humour.
The film is at its very best in the first hour. It opens at night on leafy Privet Drive. A mysterious white-haired man is dowsing the street lamps with a magic wand. He’s joined by a tabby cat who transmogrifies into a woman, and a motorcycle riding giant. [I’ll skip over the fact having extinguished the lights, presumably for secrecy, the motorcycle arrives with all lamps blazing – there are several instances of this kind of continuity error which you have to accept with a shrug of indifference or you’d be permanently picking holes in the narrative.] The three deposit a baby boy at the doorstep of the Dursley family, a boy scarred for life – literally scarred for life – by a terrible infant trauma. Cue possibly the shortest credits in cinematic history.
We next find Harry Potter, now eleven, living a dreadful existence in his uncle and aunt’s house, locked in a cupboard under the stairs, belittled and ignored. The Dursley’s really are a terrible family – the worst, apparently – and we don’t have to take a wizard’s word for it, we see it. Harry is basically the victim of child abuse, but the screenwriters and, I assume, the original author gloss over this with a sharp series of amusing scenes which portray them as monstrous while persuading us Harry hasn’t been harmed, physically or mentally. In fact, it’s fair to say while Harry is mistreated and can elicit calamitous circumstances on his keepers, he has no concept of how to harness his power when manifested. The Dursley’s, while being unfair to their nephew, do get the sharp end of everyone else’s stick.
You have to admire Daniel Radcliffe’s portrait of the young Harry. He’s quiet, but this boy has grit and intelligence. When he discovers his surrogate family have been lying to him, his reaction isn’t overbearing. There are no tears or tantrums. Later he is allowed to see his parents through the prism of a magical looking-glass. Once again, Radcliffe is excellent, thoughtful and sympathetic without being maudlin. Naturally, confronted by the truth, he high-tails it off to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry accompanied by Hagrid, that motorcycle riding giant. Hagrid is our Harry’s somewhat bumbling mentor. As played by Robbie Coltrane, he’s the compassionate if slow-witted gamekeeper of Hogwarts. Almost immediately he begins to replace the other adult figures in Harry’s life and take first place in his affection. There’s a whole sequence of nifty SFX driven scenes which show Harry getting his school equipment and making it onto a train from Platform 9 ¾ from King’s Cross station.
I could go on explaining the story, but it really isn’t necessary. At this point the drama becomes more Tom Brown’s Schooldays. We are introduced to Harry’s soon-to-be best friends, the slightly inept Ron Weasley and the brilliant but scary and very intense Hermione Granger, as well as his nemesis Draco Malfoy and the roster of teachers, each played by a doyen of the British film industry. The film doesn’t waste its time. It bounds along swiftly and energetically. Just over an hour in we finally get to the meat of the story: someone has raided a vault at the wizard bank Gringotts – but what were they trying to steal? Harry and his friends reckon it’s the legendary Philosopher’s Stone. Dear old dotty Hagrid has unwittingly dropped a few too many clues. Task set, the trio attempt to reach the fabled stone before a mysterious apparition from the Dark Side: ‘He Who Must Not Be Named.’
The story has moments of excitement: an escaping troll, an encounter with a three-headed dog, a baffling broomstick bound game of something called Quidditch and an assault course of nasty surprises for our heroes at the climax, including a deadly game of chess and a mirror with many faces. It’s a thoroughly likeable slice of entertainment. Occasionally you feel there’s too much going on. I was particularly disappointed with the references to classical mythological beasts. This seems at odds with the concept of wizards and sorcery, who nominally invoke the eerie manipulation of their surrounding environment; the notion of magical creatures is mostly redundant. But I suppose if you’re going to instigate a parallel universe-style time-line you can probably do what you want with it. That the two (three?) worlds will inevitably cross over isn’t immediately obvious and this is quite a coup on the part of the filmmakers, allowing the audience to effectively pine for more revelations.
The special effects are not first class, but creditable; I particularly liked the moving staircases. The photography is bright. I say this because too often cinematographers want to blur or dim scenes [or whole movies] for atmospheric effect. Not the case here. Chris Columbus creates his atmospheres through his characters and plot; John Seale’s images allow visual clarity. Stuart Craig’s production design is flamboyant and vivid. Radcliffe’s support cast is better than competent; Emma Watson in particular is a spiky presence. The adult actors are enjoyably fastidious. My only disappointment here was Richard Harris as Professor Dumbledore. He seems much too sallow and whispery to be a mighty wizard. The climax is unexpected and slightly creepy. The epilogue is run of the mill and betrays the film’s roots in children’s fiction.
Perhaps the very best scene occurs quite early on when Harry Potter visits Ollivander’s to purchase a wand. John Hurt is marvellous in his cameo, climbing walls of boxes piled high and higher with stick after stick, while Harry tries out wand after wand with catastrophic results. Suddenly, the director injects intrigue: Ollivander peers over his shoulder at his young charge, caresses a beautiful wand, and presents it to our Harry. ‘It is the wand that chooses the wizard,’ he states and explains that the phoenix which donated the feather to make this one, only donated one other feather: to the wand which eventually scarred Harry with a bloodied thunderbolt insignia. Suddenly, after the initial jollity, the audience is aware this boy is in danger and is part of a mystery he will need to unravel. It’s a splendid moment which sets up not only this episode but all the other’s that follow.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is a splendid piece of cinematic entertainment. It is easy to poke holes in it. It is far simpler to kick back your shoes and enjoy it for what it is, a tantalising glimpse into J.K. Rowling’s imaginary fantastical world before it all gets too complicated.
Comments
I'm the opposite, I read all seven books but never got past the third film for some reason. The later books are a bit bloated, but I think she's a good storyteller with a wild imagination. Also, the further it gets into the series, the more it is concerned with dealing with Death, a heavy lesson for a children's series. I'm middle aged and still cant process properly the losses of family and friends, yet Rowling is teaching the munchkins how to honour the memory of a lost loved one, grieve properly, and continue on with one's life.
HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS (2002)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets opens in similar fashion to the debut movie: Harry is having a rough time of it at the Dursley’s. I was surprised they had him back after the last episode. However, this time Harry has escaped the cupboard under the stairs but not his problems, either in this world or the wizarding one.
First challenge is how to control an errant house elf called Dobby. I can only give J.K. Rowling the benefit of the doubt here and suggest this character was designed for comic relief and hope he reads better on the page than he appears on screen. Dobby is an annoying runt of the highest order; even patience-personified Harry loses his temper with the snivelling little sprite. The fact his presence in this particular adventure is entirely irrelevant didn’t help matters. He warns our hero twice not to return to Hogwarts for some unspecified reason, vanishes at the question of revelation and has no role to play in the dénouement.
Unfortunately, if he hadn’t been making mischief the exciting stuff in the first half of the movie wouldn’t be necessary. Hmm; might have cut the run time down a bit then.
Chamber of Secrets isn’t a bad film, but it is storytelling by numbers. The format is exactly the same as Episode 1: Harry escapes Privet Drive, Harry meets some wizards, Harry goes to Diagon Alley, Harry goes to Hogwarts, has a Quidditch match, has lessons, meets a very odd new school master; you see where I’m coming from? It’s no surprise the eventual climax once again happens in some long forgotten underground cave. This last event, a showdown between Tom Marvolo Riddle, Harry, a phoenix named Fawkes and a raging basilisk, has its moments, but is a long drawn out and curiously static affair. All the special effects in the world can’t imbibe this scene with tension and urgency.
That winning the day all boils down ultimately to loyalty seems a trifle simplistic, especially as the hero phoenix doesn’t have any loyalty to Harry, but to Dumbledore, who isn’t even at Hogwarts, having been suspended as headmaster. The final demise of Tom Riddle however is suitably dramatic, although how you kill a memory is never adequately explained. It also takes a leap of faith from the audience to suppose that the same villain who previously latched onto Professor Quirrell’s skull cap is now inhabiting the pages of an enchanted diary. This Voldemort chap – ‘He Who Must Not Be Named’ – clearly has some staying power. One can assume he’ll be back, but no one actually predicts it this time.
Similarly, one gets the impression that these two differing worlds, the one of wizards and the one of ‘muggles’ [non-wizard folk] are going to collide more frequently. It’s never properly explained how the two interact. There seem to be a series of portals – like the Leaky Cauldron pub and Platform 9¾ - and it seems perfectly possible for some non-wizards [insultingly ‘mud-bloods’] to inhabit or at least know about the other realm, but why do the two never cross-over regularly? I was baffled by Arthur Weasley’s question to Harry about rubber ducks. ‘He’s fascinated by muggles’ explains on of his brood, but why should he be? Shouldn’t he already know about them; even Hagrid says the majority of wizards have muggle blood. It’s a mystifying conceit which didn’t penetrate much in the first movie, but is fairly obvious here as the script is at pains to point it out. It doesn’t hinder one’s enjoyment, but it does dim the experience on any intellectual level.
The film has its moments. There is a fun filled joy ride in a flying car which ends disastrously in the Whomping Willow tree, a day at the Weasley’s home which has all the accruements of a Walt Disney cartoon house, a chilling turn as Harry speaks the snake language Parseltongue and a nasty little encounter with a forest of spiders – although the chief mama arachnid, Aragog, is rather feeble and appears to be made of carpet and golf balls. The rest of it? Well, more of the same. Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson steal the acting honours among the kids and Jason Isaac’s Lucius Malfoy just about cuts it for the adults. The most astonishing turn is by Kenneth Branagh playing the incompetent wizard Gilderoy Lockhart, a fraud who everyone seems to take in the utmost seriousness. Much like Dobby the Elf, Lockhart provides comic relief. He has the benefit of being scattily amusing, but once again, his actual purpose in the narrative is irrelevant. In fact, the only adult character who is relevant is Hagrid, and his role is vastly smaller than before.
My favourite sequence came mid-way through the piece when Harry, Ron and Hermione try a Polyjuice potion and swap places with members of Slytherin House to gain information. This is a great series of scenes, starting in an abandoned girls’ bathroom where a flirtatious but self-obsessed ghost, Moaning Myrtle, haunts the U-bends, and ending with Harry and Ron impersonating Crabbe and Goyle, in the Slytherin common room. Fine acting and clever dialogue all round.
The film does all right in the production stakes. The sets and the photography, the music and costumes can’t be faulted. The problem with the film is that it feels like a re-tread of what we just saw. There’s nothing particularly new here; what is doesn’t have any relevance to the plot. Director Chris Columbus can’t do much with it. As a magician, or a bad wizard might say, it’s all smoke and mirrors. A year apart at the cinema, memories being relatively short, this isn’t a problem. Back-to-back, it certainly is.
HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (2004)
The third instalment in the Harry Potter franchise occupies a darker slice of the wizard world and with it comes a darker look and a more overtly fantastical design. We have a new director, another smattering of new characters and a monumental new Hogwarts. None of this is immediately obvious from the opening salvos. Harry has even more trouble at the Dursley’s and escapes on a zippy enchanted night bus. He’s been practising magic again and should really be expelled from his funky magic school. Except he isn’t, probably because the teachers know he’s under threat and feel they can protect him better there. That isn’t made clear initially in the plot, but by the end we understand Professor Dumbledore has had it figured all along and does everything he can to ensure Harry comes to no [well, maybe a little] harm and the pocket-sized wizard can win the day.
Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of the film is how dark it looks. The action takes place mostly at night, under overcast skies, in thunderstorms, in dank cellars or grey stone classrooms of threatening proportions. Even the local village of Hogsmeade is swathed in snow and has those blue-wintery haunted skies above it. There’s barely a ray of sunshine to speak of. Notably too Hogwarts itself has become a thing of over-elaborate gothic fussiness. The sets, whether real or CGI, are colossal. For instance, the original tower of moving staircases seems quaint compared to the skyscraper monstrosity of this one. The school now has an enormous clock with a pendulum so huge it swings across the front entrance and needs almost a hundred cogs and bearings to function. The main door is higher than a couple of houses. The Great Hall seems ridiculously out of proportion, as if only magic could keep it upright. Turrets and towers abound everywhere. Hagrid’s homely yurt is now positioned far outside the grounds and the whole Hogwarts structure seems to stand atop an enormous cliff. Students can’t approach by boat any more, they come in carriages pulled by imaginary horses. And it’s all so pitch dark: browns, coppers, blacks, oak greens, deep orange, callow yellow. Even the schoolchildren’s clothes seem to inhabit these serial shades of grey. I was so bothered by the colours of the film, I almost forgot to concentrate on the plot.
It starts robustly enough. Arthur Weasley warns Harry that a prisoner has escaped from Azkaban penitentiary. This is Sirius Black, a wizard implicated in the death of Harry’s parents. To catch the escapee, the authorities despatch the weird and wonderful and rather scary Dementors, spectre soldiers who suck the soul out of their prey. They seem a very odd choice of law-enforcement as apparently, if you happen to merely be in the way, they’ll just as likely suck the soul from an innocent. Thankfully a new recruit to the Hogwarts staff, Remus Lupin, knows the best way to deal with Dementors. He also has a chocolate addiction and a very awkward personality trait.
David Thewlis is terrific as the troubled professor. He’s much better than any of his fellow British stalwart thespians at capturing the poise, attention and sure-mindedness a teacher requires. He calls his pupils by their first names, he shares in their fun and their difficulties, both in schooling and out. He is thoughtful, protective and intelligent, without malice or conflict; in the classroom at least. He is naturally drawn to Harry as he has shared history with the young man’s parents. He also shares a past with Sirius Black and it is during this revelation that the movie begins to unhinge itself as the information comes thick and fast at a moment of high crisis and action. This never works well in the cinematic form. When characters expiate, they should be heard, without the need to rush lines, pant, gasp and shout. Instead there’s a scene where so much is revealed so fast it is almost impossible to remember exactly who said what, why and what for. Earlier on, some important details are rendered almost inaudible by Harry's inexplicably loud breathing. An audience familiar with the source novel doesn’t have this problem, but if you’re unfamiliar, well…
There are some decent sequences for us to enjoy. The first appearance of the Dementors, invading the Hogwarts Express, is startlingly spooky; I loved the Marauder’s map; Lupin’s eventual transformation into a werewolf and his subsequent dog-fight with Sirius Black’s animagus shapeshifter is suitably animalistic; and there’s a whole raft of well scripted moments for the youngsters to get their teeth into and develop their characters.
Once again, Emma Watson probably tips the scales highest, but Rupert Grint’s Ron gets most of the best lines – constantly baffled by Hermione’s coming-and-going and gradually forming a less antagonistic friendship with her. Daniel Radcliffe really comes of age here. He’s looking older, tougher, smarter. You believe less of his precociousness, more of his entitlement: this boy understands he’s a great wizard and he’s not going to accept **** from anyone to prove it. Yet he’s still haunted by his familial history and it spikes him, tortures him, and leads him to bouts of frustration, anger and tears. Disappointingly, his school nemesis Draco Malfoy has been dumbed down, becoming more of a buffoon than a terror. He’s so easily bested by Miss Granger’s right hook that you wonder where the lad’s backbone has gone.
Alfonso Cuarón, an odd choice of director, handles the actors competently. If he hadn’t this episode would be a struggle to watch as the plot crawls its way through two hours of humdrum incident before we finally get to something more potent than mere menace. The film tends to be dialogue heavy. It is either comical [thank goodness] or needs to explain itself too much. Because of the latter Prisoner of Azkaban feels over complicated. People and places are introduced because they can be, not because they need to be – I’m aware as the franchise extends this may not be a truth, but at this point, I’m sorry, it feels so – and there is a welter of indulgence [the Hogwarts choir, a pointless trip to a pub, learning to control Boggarts, an unnecessary Quidditch game, Harry doing a ‘Titanic’ on the back of a flying beastie]. The prime offense though is to have such an appalling overlayered soundtrack that you can’t hear half of what the characters are saying. There is a plethora of asides which the audience simply can’t pick up because of sound effects, music or overlapping speech. Sometimes the actors simply don’t annunciate properly and some of their lines are quite important.
Thankfully this doesn’t affect the climax which is a good old-fashioned piece of time travel nonsense. I saw it coming. I rather enjoyed it. One assumes the winning Patronus spell works best after a few hours kip in hospital. After their dual resurrection, Sirius Black, played by an overly righteous Gary Oldman, flies off into the distance like some mythical overlord and Harry flies off on a new broomstick like a boy with his first bike. Not bad, but a drudging stepdown in entertainment from the previous two episodes. Ah, well, roll on tomorrow…
HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE (2005)
Goblets and Gillyweed...
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire has even darker photography than Prisoner of Azkaban. Because of that it’s a very difficult watch. I was squinting half the time. During the brief prologue, the screen is completely black except where a custodian’s torch glimmers. This hollowing of the screen continues during the many night-time and candle lit scenes which pervade this long-winded adventure. That this story should be stretched to such length defies belief when it contains possibly the simplest story to follow of the franchise so far.
We start with some non-sensical and entirely superfluous blood and fire at the Quidditch World Cup, a tournament whose stadium would give the Star Wars Senate house a run for its money. Constructed entirely of wood, this sporting arena could only be designed by magic. Earlier, when Harry enters a TARDIS-like tent he grins and says: ‘I love magic.’ Good job too. After the black cloaked Death Eaters cause chaos at the QWC, its back to Hogwarts and the Tri-Wizard Tournament. This affair involves the visit of two foreign wizard schools, the all dancing swooning girls of Beauxbaton and the fearsome irrepressible force of Durmstrang, Bulgarian, all male and looking suspiciously like adults not kids. It’s interesting to see the wizard world spread it self beyond British shores. Suffice to say, despite not being eligible or even entering this contest, Harry Potter’s name is spat from the Goblet of Fire. Inevitable, wasn’t it? Cue backstabbing, jealousy and rivalry.
The contest consists of three challenges. The first is a dragon baiting battle on an enormous scale and in another wooden arena. Take it or leave it. Up to this point the film has been universally earnest. The most notable character is a seemingly drunken one-eyed crazy professor of Dark Arts, Alastor ‘Mad Eye’ Moody. Played by Brendan Gleason he’s a joy and brings much needed entertainment to a movie which is sorely lacking it up to this point. Every scene with him in is a little gem. Daniel Radcliffe does his baffled look, anxious look, angry look over and over and just about convinces. He’s getting older, clearly; his hair is wild, his physique broader and while he’s always been a hero, he commits himself to some brawny antics here which the weedy fellow of the past surely couldn’t.
The middle section of the movie is the lightest and most rewarding. Hogwarts holds a Yule Ball, an event that has all the hallmarks of a teen comedy: boys pairing off with girls they don’t like, envious of the one’s they do, dancing lessons, embarrassing questions, awkward silences, hormones raging. Hermione seems to have the most fun – until Ron unfathomably cold-shoulders her. Neville Longbottom meanwhile turns out not only to be a brilliant herbalist but a mean polka partner. Harry’s attempts to provoke genuine romance fail and he ends up running scared of girls after a risqué bathroom encounter with Moaning Myrtle. After these bright, snowy and icescape furnished scenes, it’s back to the mysterious depths of the Black Lake and an encounter with the Mer People. This is about as good as a fantasy adventure can get. There’s some astonishing underwater photography, excellent creature effects and a superb solution to Harry’s underwater breathing problems. This was a suspenseful, shockingly creepy sequence, made all the more powerful by the suggestion of impending death: quite why the organisers of this event would put four young students at risk of drowning has to remain unexplained.
Indeed, death does rear its head in the Potter world at last. One of the Ministers for Magic bites the dust, followed by Cedric Digory, Hogwart’s favourite son [What? It isn’t Harry Potter? Well, well…]. The final contest takes place in an evil maze and it held my attention less and less. The intention all along was for Barty Crouch Jr, a follower of Lord Voldemort, to kidnap our bespectacled one via the Tri-Wizard Cup, in reality a time portal. Are you getting this? It doesn’t matter. Harry is tortured, Cedric dies, Voldemort gets another more permanent lease of life and it’s all carried out on a dodgy studio set of continued darkness and bleakness.
It’s fair to say that other than Brendan Gleason, no one really steals any acting honours here; the kids are as good as they come; Michael Gambon has a couple of moments of intensity and ire which Richard Harris’ whispery Dumbledore could never have interpreted; Snape is suitable slippery. Mike Newell’s direction is uninspired and flat. I can’t say much about the prerequisite effects and the production values. Lots of good costumes; no dragons are hurt. Photography: too dark.
At the end Emma Watson’s still spiky Hermione says: ‘Everything’s going to change now.’ She’s talking about the friendship between the three heroes, which has fractured, repaired itself and grown. This still inseparable trio will have other battles to fight, personal and wizard-ly. All I can say is, I hope their world brightens up a little bit.
Your assessments are good, but maybe a bit overdue. 😁
😊
HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX (2007)
David Yates is the director of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fourth different helmsman in four films. He manages to extend the dark theme fostered on us by Alfonso Cuarón for Prisoner of Azkaban and maintained by Mike Newell in the deft Goblet of Fire. Yates seems to have far more reason to darken the world than his predecessors, for this time out Harry Potter is the prime focus of the deep-seated evil which comes Hogwart’s way. He isn’t a bad person: Sirius Black, his godfather and father-figure tells him explicitly he’s chocka full of goodness, but a muddled and stressed Harry learns the evil Lord Voldemort is invading his conscious. You can image how cheerful he’d be about that.
Author J.K. Rowling really puts her young hero through the ringer on this one. Expelled then reinstated from school for conducting magic spells in the ‘muggle’ world – incantations he only performed to save his despicable cousin from having his soul ripped out by a rogue Dementor – Harry has been experiencing a raft of nightmares which won’t sail on any placid sea. Luckily, as the movie progresses, he begins first to fight back against the mind-meld and also to interpret what he dreams. Hats off to Daniel Radcliffe for bringing us a more rounded vision of Mr. P. Usually saddled with a limpid smile, agonised gazing and some thoughtful musings, he’s all hustle and bustle this time around; forthright, angry, determined. On several occasions he loses his temper without a care for who he offends. Ron Weasley gets the brunt end; Rupert Grint is suitable sallow. I like this version of Harry. It feels like a genuine troubled teenager, not the precocious good-egg we’ve usually witnessed. Let’s face it Mr P. has battled bad wizards, seen his friends die, resurrected a few and even fought the heaviest of heavy’s, Lord V, in a wand dual of stupendous grandeur. By the end of this episode he’s at the heart of another familial tragedy. Hardly surprising Harry’s starting to look a bit frazzled. Poor lad’s only fifteen.
I’m getting used the size of everything in the wizard world. Big or Bigger. This story goes Bigger. There are another host of enormous sets, a friendly giant, not one but two hidden abodes, a flying squad of mystical invisible beasts [the Thestrals], a huge cast list and a monumentally dramatic music score, based on John Williams’ but adapted by Nicolas Hooper. Other than the almost prerequisite dull and dark photography, I can’t fault the look of the thing, retaining as it does what we’ve seen before and only adding detail where need be. In fact, the new designs from Stuart Craig peel back some of the excesses of the past two movies. When Harry is on trial while the judges seem far too numerous, the courtroom itself is squat and spare; the Room of Requirement is a big functional empty space which allows Harry’s impromptu Dark Arts lessons to take centre stage; Dumbledore’s study – so often a source of golden light in the oil slick black – is rendered a gloomy clutter, as if it [he] anticipates life at Hogwarts is out of control.
Screenplay-wise, writer Michael Goldberg has done a clever trick of intertwining two themes, the threat of the Dark Lord and the [lesser?] evil of dictatorial control of education, and by extension thought, here represented by Dolores Umbridge, a splendid Imelda Staunton, all bristling righteousness. Clad in pink and drinking sweet tea in front of her saucers of kittens, she’s a benevolent antagonist, whose ability to inflict pain and hurt is carried out first by stealth, seemingly from necessity, later in anger from increasing paranoia. Her detention punishment for Harry is particularly grim and, almost literally, underhand. Like most megalomaniacs, her rule is accepted with initial indifference, before caution is replaced by fear leading to outright opposition. She recruits most of Slytherin House to do her dirty work, including drug induced interrogations of young girls; Harry’s squeeze Cho Chang gets particularly rough treatment which we thankfully do not see. An arch villainess indeed, much more capable than Helena Bonham Carter’s rampaging Bellatrix Lestrange who spends most of her time giggling and swooning in equal aplomb. Carter can be so much better than this, but she’s overacting her small role and it overpowers her scenes in the eventual dénouements, of which there are three.
There isn’t a lot many of the actors can do with any of their roles. With the exception of Radcliffe, Grint and the ever-watchable Emma Watson, no-one else has enough game time to make an impression. This is definitely more a coming of age film and the biggest support roles are taken by the child actors: Matthew Lewis’ Neville Longbottom, Bonnie Wright’s Ginny Weasley and Evanna Lynch’s bizarre Irish moppet Luna Lovegood. Along with the usual triumvirate, this trio turn out to be Year 5’s most accomplished wizards and set out to create Hogwart’s very own Order of the Phoenix: Dumbledore’s Army. This leaves plenty of scope for some magical mischief (Ron’s twin brothers the prime architects), a lot of soul searching and a little bit of love. Previously vital characters such as Hagrid, Remus Lupin, Sirius Black, Professors Snape and McGonagall hardly feature. Even Dumbledore’s a fleeting presence.
The old bearded one does eventually get his moment in the limelight, although his odd and introspective behaviour seems to be mirroring Harry’s: he’s the most agitated and angry we’ve ever seen him. It’s unclear exactly why Voldemort wants Harry’s prophecy sphere, but we’ll leave that and revel in the splendid CGI effects as an endless hall full of mysterious crystal globes erupts into shards and splinters of glass and the Stupendous Six Students battle the Death Eaters, before rescue comes in the form of the real Order of the Phoenix. Finally, breathlessly, Dumbledore saves a grief-stricken Harry from the crazed wiles of the Dark Lord in a wonderful wizardly dual, all lightning, fiery serpents and whirl pools. It’s probably the most gripping and sustained action sequence the series has yet produced and for once all the necessary explanations have already been done, so the audience isn’t confused, merely enthused by what it witnesses.
I was very impressed with Order of the Phoenix. When I saw it previously, it barely registered, perhaps because Umbridge and Luna Lovecraft aside, it fails to introduce its new characters effectively and doesn’t concentrate on its old ones. But that’s missing the point: most of those characters are adults and the driving force of the film isn’t them, it’s the students, their abilities and personalities. Little nods are given to the previous films. It was good to see the spooky Dementors return as well as the reintroduction of the Death Eaters. The reuse of the Mirror of Erised was especially effective, providing the moment when Harry and Neville realise they have a shared parental loss.
It’s fair to say the film won’t be as accessible to younger children as the earliest adventures, but it certainly out marches the last two, and while it retains a serious edge, director and writer are careful to balance even the most ardent moments with a gentle humour which allows the tension and the audience to breathe. It is only at the very climax that gravitas takes over and drama swamps the action in a riot of deadly, if magical, violence. By then, we’ve reached the edge of our seats. At the epilogue, a moment of calm settles, expecting the perpetual storm. More of that next time, no doubt.
A big thumbs up.
HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE (2009)
I’d like to say Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a lot of fun, but that seems rather a glib reflection given it ends with a tragic tone. I’m sure I don’t need spoiler alerts, but Harry’s penultimate year at Hogwarts is climaxed by the death of its headmaster, Professor Dumbledore, in a moment of highly stylised drama, abracadabra-ed off the top of the school Astronomy Tower by none other than the withering, steely Severus Snape, who appears to have at last revealed his true colours and pinned them to the mast of the Dark Lord.
Despite ending on a sorrowful note, Half-Blood Prince is a far better product than most of what came before it. David Yates, who directed the previous episode, and returning screenwriter Steve Kloves, continue to concentrate their attention on the young students and their hopeless / successful / unfulfilled relationships, romances, schoolwork; probably in that order. There’s less teaching going on in this one, so there’s no time to treat the masters like buffoons. Instead the new Potions Professor becomes the focus of attention, returning to a position he deserted years before. Horace Slughorn, as played by Jim Broadbent, is a ditherer, a worrier, a malcontent. He’s also a phenomenal teacher and ingratiates himself with his pupils through a series of social gatherings [the Slug Club] which might have succeeded twenty years ago, but appear uniformly odd to the new crop of students, who are uncertain whether to take them seriously or not. They all seem much more preoccupied with who’s kissing who or not kissing, as the case often appears to be.
What Yates and Kloves have done is fashioned an appropriately identifiable scholarly and social world for our heroes. They sneak to the pub, they play tricks, they talk in guarded terms, try to learn, prefer to tease, support and admonish, all within the confines of their boarding school. They are the seniors now and they are making mature decisions about mature subjects. Their disappointment is as keenly felt as their success. Their mistakes often make us, the audience, laugh – as they will do when these fledglings cast their forty-something eyes back on their school days: ‘Do you remember when Hagrid and Slughorn got pissed, Ron fancied Lavender Brown, when Hermione drank too much butter beer, when Gryffindor won at Quidditch without conceding a point, when Luna wore that wedding cake dress, etc, etc?’ The dialogue crackles and sparkles with insinuation and irony, is wrapped in comedic visuals, witticisms and the occasional spoonful of sugary sarcasm. It’s also neat enough to be subtle, emotional and, occasionally, just a little soppy. There’s even the suggestion that our youthful tribe may be experimenting with more than just kisses, luck and love potions; yes, [dare we say it] sex really does seem to occupy some young wizard minds, although the writers are careful enough to dilute the suggestions.
Harry Potter isn’t really supposed to be about teenage angst, but author J. K. Rowling has invested much in her characters and they blossom fully realised beneath this director’s sterling guidance. The film’s really a three-hander. Harry, Ron and Hermione interact with consummate ease; it’s as if actors Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson have genuinely grown up together. When they are asked to laugh, or console, or encourage, they don’t need to enact it, so much as believe it, because they are confident in their colleagues’ ability to react and counter-react. Consequently, their performances are more nuanced and the first two thirds of the film become a positive joy.
Among all the good-natured rib-tickling, Yates hasn’t neglected the overarching storyline. Lord Voldemort is back and so are his Death Eaters, led by the fearsome Bellatrix Lestrange, a more subdued Helena Bonham Carter. The Dark Lord doesn’t put in an appearance himself, but his presence is hovering over everything, like an all-consuming mist. There’s no hint of sunshine in this adventure. It is uniformly black. The only brightness comes from candles, wizard wands and balls of fire, illuminating the heavy aromas but not extinguishing them, for there is always mystery in the unfathomable depth of the shadows which surround our heroes.
Yates treats his audience as adults and laces scenes, sometimes innocuous ones, with hints of impending doom. There’s some dodgy business going on in Knock Turn Alley. Slughorn’s memories are slavishly creepy. Students are injured and poisoned. The Weasley’s ramshackle burrow home is attacked and destroyed during a gentle Christmas gathering. Additionally, the original manifestation of Draco Malfoy has returned. While his experiments with the Vanishing Cabinet are a nonsensical diversion, I was glad to see the back of Tom Felton’s interpretation of Malfoy as a hapless bully. He was always at his best when impelled to be a nasty son-of-a-bitch. He does that well here and couples it with a struggling conscience. His comeuppance, a tussle with Harry which brings to mind angry school boys and ‘fight, fight, fight’ is fittingly swift. Once more Draco’s fallibility is exposed. Will he ever be as capable as the true Dark Lord? We think not for, as a young Tom Riddle, Lord V. inhabits a series of intensely foreboding emerald tinged memory sequences during which he quite obviously has the upper hand over everyone and everything, intellectually and skilfully, better even than the best teachers.
He effectively ended Slughorn’s career, which is why the Potions Professor may hold a vital secret which will uncover Voldemort’s Achilles Heel. The opening gambit involves Dumbledore and Harry discovering Slughorn hiding in a muggle-home. A lovingly manufactured scene becomes entirely superfluous as the film progresses, for everything said here is repeated at a later stage of the narrative. It’s probably the only misstep the filmmakers take. The major plot contrivance comes from the original author, for as the whole narrative evolves, it’s perfectly obvious she’s toying more with characters than with storyline.
Plot-wise, the search for a hidden Horcrux, one of seven artefacts that contain the Dark Lord’s soul, one for each of his victims, is an incident designed purely to bring forward the film’s tragic ending: almost two hours pass before we even find out what Dumbledore is so concerned about. To achieve all this, we must go underground again: a stormy sea cave leads to a tranquil subterranean lake inhabited by one Horcrux and an army of ugly naiads, who almost drown our Harry. While this sequence generally drags, it does have one or two split-seconds of sheer terror, which demonstrates Yates knows his horror movies, and hints, fleetingly, at a deeper truth Dumbledore may have stumbled upon. After this over-indulgence, its back to Hogwarts, the Death Eaters and assassination.
That the reclaimed antique pendant is fake sticks like a craw in everyone’s throat. Was it all worth it? we ask. Well, we’re lucky the filmmakers have given us a product so blatantly enjoyable it hardly registers that the plot is thin as ice and is only a hinge to the door of tragedy. You can forgive a sad ending if it befits a film and Dumbledore’s demise has the hallmarks of shocking conclusion. That he appears to have died in vain only makes his loss more keenly felt. This wasn’t a heroes’ death. Harry Potter, who loses all his best adult friends, is suitably distraught and never quite recovers. Vengeance is on his mind even in the short coda. He’s learnt to trust no-one and is convinced his curse – once jokingly said – is to be the Chosen One and that his destiny is mapped before him. This is all a bit of formulaic hokum [why is there always a ‘chosen one’ in these fantasy films?] but you do feel he’s got his muggle head screwed on and his wizard one knocked off a bit: Harry’s got the girl he fancies, but he’s starting to lose his marbles. Can’t be easy being the Chosen One. Can’t be easy being a sixteen-year old. David Yates ensures Half-Blood Prince portrays both worlds with much clarity, lashings of good humour, emotional depth, muscular vigour and gut-strung tension.
Loved it.
Very enjoyable reviews, I'm looking forward to the rest.
I read the books first, so some of the more glossed over plot points were less noticeable. I'd have liked "Phoenix" to have been two movies to avoid missing parts of the book, though.
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART ONE (2010)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One is a world away from the joyful sentiments of the earliest incarnations of our fabulous boy wizard. It’s about as dark as a children’s film can get. It’s also about as dark as cinematography can get. I know I’ve laboured this point several times, but really there is no excuse for shoddy visuals. The film does itself and its audience a disservice by electing to be so ridiculously black and charcoal and grey. I counted exactly one shot where the sun shone, and ironically that was immediately after Hermione and Harry had an almighty row with Ron, which saw accusations flying and the embittered Weasley boy tramping off into the night. Irony has its place, but in a movie so bleak this must count as the deliberate emotional torture of Hermione, whose love affair is clearly not glowing with sunshine.
Harry doesn’t help, taking her for an impromptu romantic waltz. In adult hands this would be the prelude for the pair to, well, pair-off. In the less raunchy world of teenage wizards, they separate and exchange curious, nervous glances, sort of ‘whatever will be, won’t be.’ I mention this only because there is so little other character development. These scenes of envy and anger, betrayal, misunderstanding and wish-fulfilment get to the heart of the triumvirate’s close-knit rapport, which has always trod a fine line between friends and lovers. Let’s face it there will always be three of them whatever potential relationships evolves; poor Ginny Weasley, Harry’s other-half, must be the most trusting girlfriend in the wizarding world.
These insightful moments come about because the three youngsters have found the real Horcrux pendant thanks to a cryptic message hidden inside the fake locket they found in the last episode. Luckily Harry’s having nightmares again and these help him fit all the clues together. Do you follow? No, neither did I. Anyways, the pendant works a bit like that bloody ring Tolkien wrote about, bringing out the worst aspects of the wearer’s personality. They discover it has been acquired by Dolores Umbridge, who returns as a fully paid up member of the Dark Lord’s entourage, and is even more ruthless than before. While escaping from the Ministry of Magic after stealing it back, Ron gets horribly injured, which slows the hunt for more artefacts to a crawl. The power of the pendant pits he and Harry against one another. Hermione seems curiously resistant.
This walking-pace story line takes an age to get going. The whole middle section of the film is bogged down with the three heroes mired in a forest and living in a tent and doing, well, nothing. Interspersed around it have been some fine pieces of action, but even these begin to weary as they become repetitive and confusingly edited. Harry’s allies get picked off steadily, one-by-one: Hedwig, Mad-Eye Moody, Dobby the Elf, even Ron momentarily abandons ship – only to inexplicably return with an inexplicable explanation and carry out an inexplicable rescue of an inexplicably stupid Harry Potter, who wants to drown himself in an ice-cold lake. The best sequences are a pair of stand-offs between the threesome and Lord Voldemort’s hit-squad: first, two Death Eaters are eliminated in a London coffee shop; latterly a pack of Snatchers pursues them through a pine forest, wands flashing in the twilight, a chase devoid of incidental music and much better for it. These two scenes demonstrate how dark and light can be effectively employed to add tension and dread to what unfolds. Unfortunately, too often things are dark just because they can be, not because they need to be. Even a wedding takes place beneath overcast skies and what we see of it is at night, by candlelight, again.
There’s so much wrong with this film. Its pacing is off. It is gratuitously violent. Twice there is brief unnecessary tasteful nudity. The episodic structure doesn’t lend itself to suspense. We see lots of incident we’ve already seen before [Polyjuice potion anyone? again and again and again]. The army of students has been conveniently forgotten. There is a sense of humour failure. The writers (I’m including the original author J.K. Rowling in this assessment) have created something of a cat’s cradle plot. There is a lot of extraneous explanation – has to be I think to resolve this Horcrux crisis – much of which simply extends the narrative. Worse, it’s all carried out at a snail’s crawl. This movie is well over two hours in length and achieves very little for that time. Worse than that is the knowledge I’d probably forget what I’d watched in Part One when I view Part Two. Luckily, I’m doing this on consecutive days, but originally the films were released six months apart. If you don’t know your Potter-lore, you’d be hard pressed to recall a thing. I could go on. I won’t.
One note of satisfaction is the animated interpretation of the Deathly Hallows ghost fairy tale. Well told and beautifully illustrated, this got my attention at a point the film was losing it. Quentin Tarantino used this gimmick in Kill Bill and here, as then, the visual explanations prove memorable; we remember who and what the Deathly Hallows are far more than the rest of whatever nonsense the cast regale us with. Another features the Dark Lord’s proxy takeover of the Ministry of Magic, which cleverly resembles the excesses of Fascism, Stalinism and state control and interrogation. This is a particularly astute analogy, for we know Voldemort is half-Muggle, which makes his promotion of Pure Blood wizards very like the Arian infatuations of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels, men who singularly did not resemble their ideals.
On the downside I became slightly confused by the dimensions of the Wizard world; not for the first time have I struggled to assimilate the two. It’s obvious from the amount of incarcerations and executions carried out by the new black-garbed Ministry that muggles and wizards have always associated with each other, often married and proceeded to live in the ‘real’ world. We know this because there are portals to magical places dotted all around Britain, I assume other countries also, and Ministry employees – including the Muggle obsessed Arthur Weasley – seem to walk to work through London and use these portals quite openly. So how do you reconcile that so many wizards know nothing of the ‘muggle’ world? At one point a member of the Order of the Phoenix has been assigned to ‘be with the Prime Minister’: does that mean all our Prime Ministers have been aware of Wizards and Witches? What’s the balance here? Is every murder by a Dementor passed off as an unsolvable crime? When the wizards are mounting broomsticks and motorbikes above London and having flying battles with Death Eaters, does nobody notice, not even when the dead presumably drop to the ground? My confusion is probably misplaced, but the fact I was more concerned about this aspect of the movie than anything else which took place does suggest it’s an ill-thought adventure which fails to hold the audience’s attention.
Deathly Hallows Part One should have been about half the length. It’s overblown, self-important and for most of its running time, dull. The saddest thing isn’t the death of Dobby the House Elf, it’s the sudden lack of any fun our heroes are having. They’ve become an earnest, bitter, emotionally fragmented bunch and it’s rather tough to take.
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART TWO (2011)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two starts off with a scene of epic proportions: from above we witness the arrival of the students at Hogwarts, phalanxes on parade, an army clad in black gowns, the sky ever darkening, the music from Alexandre Desplat suitably Romanesque. It’s about the best individual shot in a movie which has the unfortunate habit of falling into all the pitfalls that a concluding episode of a franchise contains.
Having spent Part One doing very little, Part Two worryingly kicks off in the same vein with two exceedingly dull conversations between Harry and Ollivander the wand maker, then Griphook, a goblin who works at Gringotts and first showed Harry his vault way back in the opening half hour of The Philosopher’s Stone. We have to have these mild interrogations because an audience might have forgotten the importance these people play in Harry Potter’s life. On the other hand – my hand – you really might not care. It’s easy for writer Steve Kloves to claim they want to retain as much of the novel’s detail as possible, but the adaptor’s job is to condense what is written so it can be interpreted easily and efficiently by an audience. Deathly Hallows Part Two is a wearisome road. There really ought to be a more imaginative and curtailed way for Harry and his heroes to track down these seven Horcruxes. I also struggled to figure out what artefacts were a Horcrux and how many had been found. In Part One Ron Weasley mentioned there were only three to find, yet in this episode they destroy four, so I genuinely needed a recap to enlighten me. In a series which has taken intense pride in doing an awful lot of explanation, this is a huge oversight.
Harry, Ron and Hermione kick things off with a successfully action-packed trip to Gringotts, whose vaults seem to penetrate the bowels of the earth, and from here on there is hardly a let up in the pace. Not only does the violence become bloody and non-stop, but the actors can’t slow down their dialogue. Everything is shouted, fast, garbled, overlayered. Too often – as happened with The Prisoner of Azkaban – the audience can’t hear or can’t interpret the explanatory dialogue form the aural noises around it, which includes the thumping music score. The production team, writers, director, editor, are desperately trying to cram in the resolution to every character’s story and there isn’t time in this frenetic finale to adequately do justice to that. We discover in single sentences or rapid visuals that people have married, had children, have fallen in love, been in love all along, switch sides, betray, live, die, mourn, it’s a hopeless mess of a narrative which doesn’t do any favours to the main storyline: the destruction of Voldemort.
There are a few moments of quiet. Harry takes one of Severus Snape’s dying tears and learns about his mother’s past, a revelation which reshapes his opinion of the black cloaked school master. Later, having sacrificed himself, he discusses the meaning of life with Albus Dumbledore: ‘On.’ I’d like to say a little thanks to the filmmakers for drawing back from any Messianic analogies here. No humanly or wizardly impossible rising from the grave. I assume he’s protected by the Resurrection Stone, one of the three Deathly Hallows, but I’m not entirely sure. That he appears to drop the stone before he’s killed by the Dark Lord seems odd, is not explained and leaves me questioning the authority of the editor, Mark Day, who must have had a reason for inserting the shot, but leaves it tantalisingly unresolved. Similarly, during the Pensieve memory sequence, there isn’t quite enough detail; many of the scenes feel incomplete, as if there is a whole other movie waiting to spring forth from Snape’s tears [oh, dear, no. no, no…]. As said before, at the very point of necessary expansion, the scenes and dialogue seem to condense. It’s a bothersome muddle.
The movie heroically maintains its muscular thrust. Time passes rapidly. There’s lots of wand waving, fighting, broomstick and dragon flying, there’s fire in the Room of Requirement, statues robotically animate, we see massed evil armies, bridges are destroyed, Hogwarts is virtually bombed to oblivion, the Great Hall becomes a field hospital, blood, dirt, smoke and brimstone; even in the wizard world, war is hell. Despite this, I wasn’t particularly satisfied with the end product, which stank of Lord of the Rings, and for all director David Yates’ good intentions it outstays its welcome and the battles become turgid and uninteresting. By the time Harry and Voldemort finally share a death duel, we’ve had its dénouement telegraphed for us and it’s disappointing that for all the central trio’s hard work, Neville Longbottom commits the final act of destruction. Maybe that’s fitting for he’s been one of Harry’s staunchest supporters and gives a well-intentioned speech about hearts, trust and togetherness before the final fling. It’s the sort of monologue I’d expect to read in a children’s book and the scene - and that snake decapitation - betray the film’s origins in the most obvious of methods.
Overall, it’s a sturdy production. I won’t comment any more on Eduardo Sera’s bleaker than bleak photography, which as the movie progressed made me more and more depressed. I can’t say much about the performances either, crammed as they are in between the impressive special effects. I’d begrudgingly say the adventures climax on a high point, if you like explosions and fantasy battles. I was more impressed by the quiet moments, which seemed to harken back to the very best and mysterious climes of the series.
The Deathly Hallows Part Two does its best, but while its immediate predecessor was long winded in achieving very little, this is equally long winded in attempting too much. Ultimately both episodes are dull. There’s nothing particularly new or startling on show here, so it genuinely feels like an exercise in T-crossing and I-dotting. An underwhelming end.
FINI
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