Thursday, July 16, 2009

From hibernation to the Half-Blood Prince

Well, at least Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince achieved something... it got me out of hibernation mode.

PVR was running "paid preview" shows of the movie tonight, a day before it officially releases in India. So of course, I went.

In a nutshell? Disappointing.

As people who have been following this blog since the beginning of time would know, I get all excited about the HP movies, but I also tend to go in for them with zero expectations. Now, the last two movies - Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix - managed to impress me somewhat, primarily thanks to their climax scenes, which were fairly well made.

The sixth movie, however, failed in two major areas: a, way too much importance and screen time given to the silly teen love angles, and it was done really stupidly, which meant that all through the movie, I was groaning in exasperation at regular intervals. (I mean, Ginny tying Harry's shoelaces? What the hell was that?) B, the climax scene was really, really, really lame. And the ending was plain dumb.

Of the two added scenes, the first one, which became the opening to the movie, was fairly cool, and you could see why it was added. I had an impact. The second one, however, was poorly done, pointless, and added nothing to the story.

The characters: Emma Watson continues to annoy me, and is really too pretty to be playing Hermione. Her hair's not even bushy! Ron's role was reduced dramatically for some odd reason, which was a pity I thought, and totally unnecessary. Yet again, not enough of the Weasley twins. Lupin's and Tonks' romance was mentioned rather dismissively. And Michael Gambon just doesn't work as Dumbledore. And I didn't see the point of showing Fenrir Greyback if they weren't going to build on it - almost all the incidents talking about him were cut out.

Voldemort's backstory was cut short ruthlessly - only the two critical scenes were shown. Dumbledore tells Harry nothing about what the horcruxes are likely to be, so God alone knows what they'll do in the next two movies.

I'm currently rereading the series - backwards. On the fifth book right now; four more to go!

5 comments:

The Seeker said...

Hmm... I'm going to see it anyway. Although those lovey dovey subplots annoyed me in the book already, so I dunno what I'm going to make of them being even worse in the movie...

The Seeker said...

By the way... 'Blogs I read mainly because I know the bloggers' could very easily be taken the wrong way (or what I hope is the wrong way anyway). :p

R said...

'twas ok, I remain indifferent to it. Great fun to watch with friends so you have someone to cling to in the scary bits.

a traveller said...

There were no scary bits. Ok except for like one second in the cave. The rest of the movie was so blah.

Runjoo said...

they burned *the burrow*!!! sacrilege....

i actually dislike all the movies...its horrible to watch if you know how much they've cut out...and they invariable chop off the fun bits.