Harry Potter and His Half-Arsed Attempt at a Good Film

Welcome to the Agglomeration

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince Review

Harry Potter. Say the two words and half the world falls into a spell of Hogwarts infatuation Syndrome. Perhaps the most hyped up movie to be released this year, there certainly was a lot of expectation for Harry Potter 6 to excel and deliver when I went to see it. A packed cinema full of chatty girls bitching about popcorn, anxious kids anticipating the Potter phenomenon and a random family behind me who between the four of them, received and actually answered 4 different phone calls throughout the entire movie, after having spent 10 dollars on a Ice Age 3 Plushie Claw Machine. Not exactly the best setting but nevertheless, I suppose, a fitting atmosphere, seeing as Harry Potter 6, I daresay, was a failure.

The problem with Harry Potter 6 was that it was a movie of two halves, with the first half being twice as long as the second, as well as being almost completely unnecessary. Now let me preface this by saying I wasn't sure if I was going to see this film, and in fact I asked one of my friends who had seen it on its debut night whether or not it was worth going to. She said, Yes, as long as you don't think of the book as you're seeing it, because it cut a lot out. I thought, Well, fair enough, it's a bloody long book, and parts of it were probably not that important anyway and as long as the editing was alright, there certainly was no reason to hold a grudge against the movie just because of that.

As it turns out, the editing was crap. Now, I don't remember the book's events because it's been years since I last read it, but I remember thinking to myself that the book's effort surpassed greatly the enormous, literally, letdown that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was. In this case, if you want to have a 158 minute movie, you better make it worthwhile. Instead, the pacing and the editing was abysmal. Storylines were slow and dull, dragging out stuff for the sake of dragging it out, and providing lots of unnecessary exposition to scenes that could've been massacred in half.

The result of this was that not only did we lose a lot of potential to make scenes more powerful and to have a stronger relevance to the main storyline, we also lost a sense of the magic, pardon the pun, that is Harry Potter, and because of that, the characterisation was extremely weak. In fact the only real characterisation was relationshipy angst. I could care less about a Hinny relationship or Hermionder love triangle, but the first 'half' of the film acted just like foreplay to the hookups that didn't really establish themselves strongly at the conclusion of the film.

Many storylines that I was actually interested in therefore suffered, as a lot seemed to only be hinting at the reality of things and by giving us the bare minimum, the Harry-Draco conflict, the Snape-Draco relationship, and the mystery surrounding the Half-Blood Prince were suspenseless. Having said that, there were a few redeeming qualities of the film. The movie was mostly well done from the moment of Aragog's humourous yet touching farewell, that led to Slughorn's disclosure of his memory and thereby establishing the Horcruxes as the main storyline finally. The resultant cave expedition, Dumbledore/Snape confrontation and the former's death scene were fantastic. The music in the death scene was especially moving, and the united raising of wands to dispel the Dark Mark with light was certainly the best scene of the film.

For me, Harry Potter 6 was a classic example of too little, too late in a film that was overall not a worthy tribute to the book. Yes, films are mostly always worse than the books (I daresay Goblet of Fire came very close though), the but the discrepancy and the nature of the film simply left me feeling unsatisfied. It lacked the charm and the fantasic realism that accompanied previous films. I didn't feel like I was immersed in the world of Hogwarts, I was merely a spectator to events that for most of the film, didn't invoke any feeling of spectacularity.

If you are a diehard Harry Potter fan, nothing I'll say will change your mind of seeing the film. All I can say is that, if you are unsure and you're tussling between this and say, The Hangover, I would strongly not recommend you see this film. Many people will be content with the fact that since it's Harry Potter, it will undoubtly be good. Those people are idiots.

The silver lining to this abominable cloud is that, hopefully with all this relationship crap out of the way, the film(s) made to the plot of 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' may be plot-centric, instead of being a sandwich containing 8 slices of bread, and one slice of ham.

4/10

P.S - It was probably about as bad as Knowing. I forget what I gave it, but if it was higher, I apologise.

Till next time, may you agglomerate all your unpremeditated contemplations