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Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince – (Harry Potter 6) – Warner Bros.

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars.

Could do better.

Directed By:
David Yates

Screenplay By:
Steve Kloves

Adapted from
the novel – Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince by: JK Rowling.

Starring: In
no particular order.

Daniel
Radcliffe – Harry Potter

Emma Watson -
Hermione Granger

Rupert Grint -
Ron Weasley

Tom Felton -
Draco Malfoy

Bonnie Wright -
Ginny Weasley

Michael Gambon
- Albus Dumbledore

Alan Rickman -
Severus Snape

Jim Broadbent -
Horace Slughorn

Maggie Smith -
Professor McGonagall

Robbie Coltrane
- Rubeus Hagrid

Jessie Cave -
Lavender Brown

Hero
Fiennes-Tiffin – Young Tom Riddle (Age 11)

I went to see the film on
last Sunday evening and I very much enjoyed it. Perhaps this was
largely down to the company and the night out at the cinema, but
despite my enjoyment of the event, I also felt disappointed on a
number of levels. This is not altogether unusual for me, however.
Perhaps I am somewhat of a purist, but as a reader of the books, most
of the films have disappointed me at first. Then on subsequent
viewings my opinions of each one tends to improve by the time the DVD
comes out.

So why was I disappointed
really? Perhaps it is because I had anticipated it for a very long
time. It was released almost a year later than it had been originally
planned. Perhaps it was because it was not true to the book and the
purist in me didn’t quite find enough “there” there to
satisfy me.

Or perhaps it was because
HP6 “the movie” hardly seemed to try.

It did not stay true to the
book – not at all. One could even go so far as to say it was a
complete remix of the original novel. Unfortunately the whole film
seemed to rely on the premise that existing HP fans already knew the
conclusion and this seemed to change the tone of the movie entirely.
Despite being called Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the film
did not put any emphasis on exploring Harry, Ron and Hermiones’ quest
to find out who the half-blood prince actually is. When all is
finally revealed, this left me with a sense of feeling “so
what?”

And the “unhappy
event”, as Mark Kermode described it, was a complete mess in my
opinion. I am not sure whether to write spoilers here, but if you
know the story then you know what I am talking about. It just didn’t
happen at all the way it did in the book, and seemed implausible. It
was probably a device for something in the subsequent film, but I
just didn’t buy into it.

On the plus side, overall I
would have to say Director David Yates has produced a very handsome
film. The cinematography was indeed excellent, as many reviews are
saying. Hogwarts does seem to be immense now, and beautiful, as Harry
remarked at the end of the film "I never realised how beautiful
this place is."

But this is one of my
problems with many modern films. Far too many are all style and no
substance. (Or too much style and not enough substance!) One of the
things I enjoy about British Films in general is the fact that
(usually due to a lower budget than most Hollywood blockbusters)
char­acter development and plot become much more important than
cinematography. I love to see good acting much more than I love to
view special effects. Not that I mind special effects but too many
directors overegg the pudding! A low budget is obviously not the case
with the Harry Potter franchise, so the Director is given more scope
to play with, but I personally think that the earlier films made much
better use of the fantastic array of talent.

It was a great shame in my
mind that the ever wonderful Maggie Smith’s Professor McGonagal is
very underused in this movie, we only see a fleeting glimpse of her
early on, and Robbie Coltrane’s Hagrid, only performs a mere cameo
role.

But enter Jim Broadbent as
Professor Slughorn. Broadbent played the part to absolute perfection
and one of real the highlights of the movie. He acted out the a
character which was quite different from my own mental image of Prof.
Slughorn. For example, the one I had in my head was rather camp and
really quite snobbish and unlikeable. In the film, the campness was
very much toned down and the char­acter though flamboyant and
flawed he presented a very likeable old dodder-er

The other massive problem I
have with this film, is that I don’t believe it stands alone. It just
seems to be a grand device for setting up the final 2 installments.
In case you don’t know, Book 7- the Deathly Hallows is going to be in
two parts. This film contains various plot devices that are purely
there for the purpose of setting things up for the next one! I really
didn’t like that at all.

And pass me the sick bucket.
I had totally forgotten how wretchedly awful is the crush on
“Won-Won” by Lavender Brown. Raging teenage hormones are
the biggest part of this film. They were there in the book, but I
don’t remember them being quite as central as they are here. Or
perhaps it is just that the book had a lot more else going on, the
search for the identity of the half blood prince springs to mind and
the journey into the backstory of Tom Riddle. That to me seems more
important but it was very much glossed over in the movie.

Which brings me to the
biggest thing that really annoyed me. I understand that it is
impossible to do justice to a novel, when there is only a couple of
hours with which to work with. So why in the middle of the movie,
does the screenplay veer off into something which just never happened
at all in the book? Without giving too much away, the Weasley’s
cottage was attacked, and Harry and Ginny had to face the
deatheaters. It just didn’t happen! So why waste time on it?

Director David Yates defends
himself here in Vanity
Fair

“Can you give me an
example of a particularly difficult choice you had to make in this
last film?”

“One of the things we
did was we added a sequence in the middle of the movie—the
sequence in the reeds when death eaters try and attack Harry—and
that sequence never existed in the book. In one sense it seems mad to
add something to Jo’s [read: J.K. Rowling’s] world and
Jo’s book. It’s already full of pretty rich, fantastic
stuff—why on earth would you add anything? But in the sort of
two-and-a-half hour structure of a screenplay there was a lack of a
sense of jeopardy from the outside. We were in all these romantic
entanglements and I needed to audience to be reminded of what the
threat was from the outside world. Jo talks about those things in the
background in the book but halfway through our book we needed our
audience in the theater to be aware of them and to experience them.
So we added a sequence that didn’t existed in the book but was
there, I guess, in spirit because it was happening beyond Hogwarts. “

“Did you run it by J.K.
Rowling? I’m sorry: by “Jo”?”

“Yeah, Jo was totally
cool about it. She recognized the challenge of it and the need for
it.”

Well she might be totally
cool about it, but I’m not. It wasted time which could have been used
for making the story itself much stronger. It also seemed completely
out of place and time.

Did the film pass the
Bechdel test?

• It has to have at least
  two women in it,

• Who talk to each other,
  

• About
  something besides a man.

Barely. There is a point on
the train where Luna gives Ginny a copy of the Quibbler, and tells
her about invisible creatures that float in your ears and make your
brain go fuzzy. It’s not much, it’s kookie and strange, but I think
it qualifies. And as most children’s films fail apparently, and
technically it is a children’s film (although a crossover) I think
that is worth something, more than nothing.

So in summary, I have very
mixed feelings about it. Maybe subsequent viewings will improve my
opinion of it, they usually do and because I do love the series so
much I will give it another try!

Kathryn Cann

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