I freely admit it; I’m a Harry Potter geek. This series of books has to rank up there as one of the best told stories in literature. Some would write it off as “kid’s literature”, but these are the same people who have never read the books. Not only is the story a riveting one, it’s also well told. J.K. Rowling just has a style that pulls you in and never lets go. The books are insanely good, and the movies that have come out of the books have been done really well up till now. At 47 years of age, I am unashamedly a fan of both.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 opened in theaters last Friday night, and I was fortunate enough to get two free tickets to attend. Since The Gorgeous One (my bride) isn’t into HP or the cinema in general, she let me to go and see it without her. That’s probably a good thing, since it probably wouldn’t have done her any good mentally to see her 47 year old husband go totally geek.
Going in to the movie, I already knew why they made two movies out of the last book in the series. The fact is that within Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling covered a lot of ground in the story of Harry and Co. I also knew that even with splitting the book into two movies, some scenes would be cut back drastically to only show the critical plot points.
The opening of the movie is quite somber, as the main characters get ready to start on the quest for the horcruxes. Harry says goodbye to the Dursleys, and reminisces about what life has been like in that house when he revisits the little space underneath the stairway where he used to sleep. The scene where Hermione wipes her parent’s memory of her existence kind of sets the stage for this darkest in the Harry Potter series, In the book she only explains it, but actually seeing it was really sad. Voldemort and his followers gathered around a large table is also quite menacing and just felt more menacing on the screen than it did in the book. It’s a dark opening because it’s a dark book, as war is just around the corner.
The filmmakers did a good job putting all of the pieces of this very complicated story together into something cohesive. There is a lot of ground to cover, and they could not have covered it any better, unless they were planning on making two 4 hour movies.
To be honest, while I understood why they did it, the shrinking of some of the events in the movie kind of made them lose some of the weight that they had in the book. For example, in the book, Harry, Ron and Hermione are stuck in Sirius’s house after the wedding for a long time trying to decide what they are going to do. In the movie, they made it seem like a couple of days at most. The same goes for their time jumping around from place to place in hiding. The scene where the main characters escape from the Malfoy house wasn’t nearly what I thought it was when reading it off the written page, and again seemed a lot briefer in the movie than it was in the book.
But these are minor complaints at best. Visually, the movie is really well put together, with more of the incredible special effects we have come to expect in the series. The fight to get Harry to the Weasley house; the search in the Ministry of Magic for the locket of Slytherin; all of them. The effects were so good that I actually jumped in my seat during the scene in Godrick’s Hollow where Harry is fighting Nagini. This is spite of the fact that I KNEW what was going to happen, having read the book. The colors and the scenes just seemed to pop out of the screen, as it they had been fine tuned.
Part 1 ends with the death of Dobby and the acquisition of the Elder Wand by Voldemort, which I thought was probably the best place to end the first part of the story. All in all, I was really happy with what I saw, and can’t wait to see Part 2. I want to see how they handle the battle scene at the end, and the epilogue especially. If you haven't read the books or seen any of the movies, don't waste your time going. You won't understand anything that happens because you don't have anything to base it on. If you haven’t seen the flick yet, take thyself to your local metroplex forthwith and plonk down your hard earned and be prepared to be entertained for a couple of hours. You won’t be disappointed.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 opened in theaters last Friday night, and I was fortunate enough to get two free tickets to attend. Since The Gorgeous One (my bride) isn’t into HP or the cinema in general, she let me to go and see it without her. That’s probably a good thing, since it probably wouldn’t have done her any good mentally to see her 47 year old husband go totally geek.
Going in to the movie, I already knew why they made two movies out of the last book in the series. The fact is that within Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling covered a lot of ground in the story of Harry and Co. I also knew that even with splitting the book into two movies, some scenes would be cut back drastically to only show the critical plot points.
The opening of the movie is quite somber, as the main characters get ready to start on the quest for the horcruxes. Harry says goodbye to the Dursleys, and reminisces about what life has been like in that house when he revisits the little space underneath the stairway where he used to sleep. The scene where Hermione wipes her parent’s memory of her existence kind of sets the stage for this darkest in the Harry Potter series, In the book she only explains it, but actually seeing it was really sad. Voldemort and his followers gathered around a large table is also quite menacing and just felt more menacing on the screen than it did in the book. It’s a dark opening because it’s a dark book, as war is just around the corner.
The filmmakers did a good job putting all of the pieces of this very complicated story together into something cohesive. There is a lot of ground to cover, and they could not have covered it any better, unless they were planning on making two 4 hour movies.
To be honest, while I understood why they did it, the shrinking of some of the events in the movie kind of made them lose some of the weight that they had in the book. For example, in the book, Harry, Ron and Hermione are stuck in Sirius’s house after the wedding for a long time trying to decide what they are going to do. In the movie, they made it seem like a couple of days at most. The same goes for their time jumping around from place to place in hiding. The scene where the main characters escape from the Malfoy house wasn’t nearly what I thought it was when reading it off the written page, and again seemed a lot briefer in the movie than it was in the book.
But these are minor complaints at best. Visually, the movie is really well put together, with more of the incredible special effects we have come to expect in the series. The fight to get Harry to the Weasley house; the search in the Ministry of Magic for the locket of Slytherin; all of them. The effects were so good that I actually jumped in my seat during the scene in Godrick’s Hollow where Harry is fighting Nagini. This is spite of the fact that I KNEW what was going to happen, having read the book. The colors and the scenes just seemed to pop out of the screen, as it they had been fine tuned.
Part 1 ends with the death of Dobby and the acquisition of the Elder Wand by Voldemort, which I thought was probably the best place to end the first part of the story. All in all, I was really happy with what I saw, and can’t wait to see Part 2. I want to see how they handle the battle scene at the end, and the epilogue especially. If you haven't read the books or seen any of the movies, don't waste your time going. You won't understand anything that happens because you don't have anything to base it on. If you haven’t seen the flick yet, take thyself to your local metroplex forthwith and plonk down your hard earned and be prepared to be entertained for a couple of hours. You won’t be disappointed.
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