Harry Potter & Whichever Pun on the Title You Prefer [movies]

Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
Fantasy/Young Adult; UK
153 mins

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Half-Assed Ending, Half-Assed Performances, Half-Hearted Adaptation...pick your choice.

(Spoiler Level: Assumes you've already seen it, but doesn't assume you've read the final book)

You'd think that with a name like "Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince" director David Yates and writer Steve Klowes would have...I don't know...focused on the Half-Blood Prince subplot of the book instead of writing it off with one cheesy line at the end. That's been the major problem with most of the Potter movie adaptations - they gloss over or throw out completely all of the interesting and important details that help the story make sense and/or provide justification for the characters motivations. Instead, they like to focus on random shit that doesn't really do anything for the story like kids making out, silly gags and Draco Malfoy being all mopey around the school (did he have any classes, btw, or is he majoring in Emo Studies?). The result is a series of movies that don't really make all that much sense together as an overall story. I mean, you can certainly follow them from one point to the next, but you're missing a lot of what makes the characters tick and what makes the individual events transpiring important to the overall story.

The obvious problem with "HBP" as a standalone story is the complete and utter lack of a climax - another thing that was left out of the adaptation for some reason. Wouldn't you rather have seen an epic, all out battle on the Hogwarts castle - Death Eaters vs. Order of the Phoenix and Dumbledore's Army, magic flying everywhere, people getting killed, maimed and seriously fucked up? Well, that's how the shit ended in the book - and for good reason. That's what the story needs to really feel worth it. Why that was left out in favor of a less exciting, less action-packed, less engrossing sigh of an ending I have no fucking clue. I'd love to sit down and have a talk with the douchebag that made that call. It's very sad too because visually the movie looked great and really captured a lot of the mood of the books, but where was the Order of the Phoenix? Why only one pointless scene with Lupin and Tonks? Why play down the danger all the kids were in just attending Hogwarts that year? Why make half the decisions made in this movie? It just doesn't make sense.

Most of all, "HBP" is where the shortcomings of the previous few Potter films really start to show themselves. In the books it's often shown just how similar Harry and his nemesis are and just how easily Harry could become Voldemort had certain things played out slightly differently in his life. To me, this is a very important part of the story, but it's more like an afterthought in the films. They touch on it with a line here and there, but it never really sinks in because they're just saying it, not showing it. It's also due to the fact that in order to really get that kind of thing across there's a lot of other things that need to lay the groundwork, like Harry's relationship with the parents he never knew and is only coming to learn about as he matures. However, most of the background info about his parents has been cut from the movies.

When you look at the Marauder's Map in the films, for instance, it's just a handy piece of paper that tells Harry where people are, but in the books it's more than that - it's a direct connection to the father and godfather he barely knew. Watching only the movies you wouldn't know that the map was created by Lupin, Sirius Black, Wormtail and Harry's father James. Why not? That's kind of important, I think. You also wouldn't know that Harry's dad was an animagus that could turn into a stag, hence why Harry's patronus appears as a stag in the third and fifth movies. Or that Harry's dad was an utter cunt to Snape when they were kids and Harry's mother was one of the few people that stood up for him against James' bullying, hence why Snape has such a back and forth relationship with Harry. All of these things are important to understanding the dynamics of the characters and what got them to the situations they're in currently. In comparison, is it really that important that we return to show Draco in the Room of Requirement like, 50 fucking times instead of filling in a few of those lost details?

The other glaring problem with the film is just how little it focuses on Voldemort. The majority of the book delved into the history of Tom Riddle, where he came from, what made him who he became and what effect he's had on the wizarding world. In the film adaptation we get two flashbacks of Riddle's life, but neither scene really tells us much about the man. They never mentioned how much of a sociopath he was, how he tortured two little boys in that cave that Harry and Dumbledore travel to, how he murdered his family and how he was fixated on his own lore, placing great importance on people, places and things from his past. Why is all of this important? Well, Voldemort chose several objects to make into horcruxes (beware of spoilers) and those objects were all symbolic and premeditated on his part. He wanted to place himself alongside the great wizards in history by using a personal item from each Hogwarts founders as a horcrux. This is kind of an important detail revealed in the "HBP" book because without knowing this fact there's no possible way Harry can figure out what the horcruxes are and how to find them. That's his big clue to solving the mystery and he never got it. More importantly, the audience never got it. But hey, we did get to see Harry flirting with a cute chick in the subway station, right?

And then, of course, there's the death of Dumbledore. This scene wasn't changed too much from the book, but what was changed just boggles my mind. In the book, Harry is in the tower with Dumbledore as Draco threatens him, as it was in the film, except he wasn't simply watching from below and keeping quiet, he was stunned by Dumbledore himself and then hidden under an invisibility cloak. It may not seem like this change makes any difference, but again, it goes to show the motivations behind the characters and why they do what they do. In the books, Harry is always afraid that he's not good enough to fulfill the role he's been given and this moment brings those feelings to a head. His mentor and arguably the closest thing he has to a father figure left in the world is brutally murdered in front of his eyes by someone he always distrusted and he can do absolutely nothing about it. That's one of the important psychological hurdles Harry has to overcome and they've written it out. Again, why? How hard would it have been to just do it the way it was supposed to be?

It's also worth pointing out that just about every single performance in this movie was phoned in...like, seriously phoned in. At points it sounded as if the actors were reading their lines for the very first time...and we're talking about some of the top actors of our time - Alan Rickman, Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent...how is this possible? I fully expect lackluster, stiff performances from Radcliff and Watson - they've always been shit, but they're fucking kids, they have an excuse. Maybe they're just getting sick of being glorified plot devices or cameos when they once were major players in the series.

I'm well aware that it's not the easiest thing in the world to adapt a book into a movie, but in this case the choices the filmmakers made seemed so easily remedied and the changes so incredibly pointless that it makes me wonder why they couldn't just stick to the damn script and turn out an awesome film? It would have been so easy not to screw this up that I just don't know what happened here. Maybe sabatoge was involved, I don't know, but if I were David Yates I'd sure start spreading that rumor around now for my own sake. "HBP" isn't a total shit-storm - it does have it's moments, but I'm not sure it's anything to be proud of. There are glaring mistakes that span multiple departments - story structure, writing, editing, acting, sound design - that when you put it all together, had J.K. Rowling's original concept and story not been so strong this movie would have been a complete failure.

The only area where "HBP" didn't fall short was the visuals and even there, I don't think it surpassed Alfonzo Cuaron's "Prisoner of Azkaban", which is still the best looking Potter film as far as I'm concerned.

In short...FAIL!