Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Movie review: Harry Potter 7 - part 1

After all these years the Harry Potter movie saga is drawing to a close. Six lengthy books and six extremely abbreviated movies. And of all the books, the one they decide to split in two is the one with the least going on. I'd swear they spent half the book hanging around in the woods doing absolutely jack shit.

That said, part 1 also turns out to be the best movie so far. They convey what was happening in the woods better than the audio book did. They told what the deathly hallows are better than the book or audio book did.

The movie starts with them trying to make the audience as depressed as possible. Harry's family is moving out, Hermione is wiping the memory of herself from her parents' memories, we get a list of the dead so far. We've come a long way from the happy, silly, magical and wonderful first story.

Then they back off a bit and let us have some laugh. Everybody gathers at Harry's for a bit of levity and happy reunions before going off to face death eaters and the killing off of a few more characters. Yes, Headwig still gets hurt, but they don't explore whether or not he got killed or dwell on his passing.

Being a more visual medium, the movie manages to pull a lot from war movies. The camp in the woods draws from WWI movies nicely. You see death eaters flying through the sky in formation like jet fighters. The Ministry of Magic draws nicely from "1984". Our heroes look like something out of an Anne Frank movie.

If you've been following the movies thus far, this is the one you want to see. I thought it was split into two movies to drag it out a bit longer and avoid letting this money train end. Instead it was to finally do a movie more worthy of the books that they're trying to adapt.

I won't be getting it on DVD. I have them all on audio book, which tells the story better. But it was a good movie and I'll be going to see the next one.

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