I just realised I completely neglected to write my impressions of the new Harry Potter film – to give it its full title, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1. What it shares with many of its predecessors is stunning filmmaking married to poor storytelling. When the best parts of a film are when your actors have been replaced by three arbitrary people lipsynching to their voices, and a random piece of shadow puppet-influenced CGI, you know you ought to have better source material. Painfully slowly, Harry, Ron and Hermione search for horcruxes, the horribly artificial collection quest that really shouldn’t exist outside a videogame. This means that the film revolves mostly around them being bored, hopeless and lost. Was that ever going to make a good film? Fortunately there’s some action when they break into the Ministry of Magic, but as I said, that part barely even features the performances of the main trio of actors. There are some plot elements that really make very little sense, especially when it comes to Godric’s Hollow. First, there’s a line from Hermione that is something like ‘We’ll have to go there. It’s the place that Voldemort almost died and the home of Godric Griffindor, so of course the Ministry won’t think of going there’. Wait, why not? And was leaving one snake that can’t survive falling in a hole really the best Voldemort could do as a magical trap?
The trouble is that I don’t care about getting random relics. I don’t care about Harry bickering with his friends or not particularly caring that they left everyone they love behind getting attacked by murderers. I don’t even care about the extremely tacky vision shown to Ron of Harry and Hermione getting naked and snogging. So little happened in this film that it really could have been half as long – which would have worked neatly for getting HP7 into one film.
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