Saw Deathly Hallows Part 2 on VOD last night. I'd been waiting for this to show up on our VOD, since I saw Part 1 a while back. [And I thought I'd written a review of Part 1, but I just spent about half an hour reading through old blog posts because I didn't find it under my 'movie' tag. Still can't find it. And I've got other stuff to do today.]
Anyway, since I can't link to my thoughts on Part 1, I'll just say I think they did a good job in Part 1 of editing out the long boring parts of the book to keep the action moving more. But the ending, while a logical place to cut off the story, really felt underwhelming to me.
So, Part 2. The big finale. The Battle of Hogwarts. Lots of dramatic character deaths. Harry and Voldemort finally face off. How did it turn out on film?
Well, for one, watching it on my TV in a well lit room, it was often too dark to actually see anything. Especially during the Battle of Hogwarts scenes. Maybe we should have gone to see it in the theater after all, because what I was hoping to see was lots of the big magical battle. But what I got were brief glimpses of cool magical battles between shots of black screen with a few shadowy movements or a bit of indistinct CGI glow.
And all the dramatic deaths didn't feel so dramatic. I guess it might have been for ratings purposes, but there weren't that many deaths shown, and when they did show for example Fred Weasley, Lupin and Tonks, and a few others' corpses laid out, it was so brief that it wasn't really moving.
Maybe I should have watched the movie before reading the book. I found the second half of the book to be really well done, and wrapped things up nicely. I found myself caring for the various minor characters who died when I read the book. In the movie, not so much.
So a bit disappointing end to a nice movie series, in my opinion.
Adventuring Across Avallen
3 hours ago
I saw it at the cheap theater last week and thought it was a fantastic ending to the series. A great climax.
ReplyDeleteHowever, it reminded me how extremely crappy the Star Wars series had become - no offense to Porkins!
I saw it about a month ago at a cheapo theatre. It was like $2 to see it in 3d, so I couldn't say no.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't disappointed. I hadn't watched any of the books, and some parts (like the rest of the series) made it hard for me to hold my tongue and blurt out "BUT WHY DIDN'T THEY X or Y?"
Finding out that Snape wasn't really such a bad guy (I knew it all along) was a relief, although I wish that Voldemort wasn't so Chaotic Stupid some times.
Now that it has wrapped up, I might check out Harry Potter. I've never seen any of the movies or read any of the books. Might be cool to blow through the movies sometime without having to wait for new ones to come out.
ReplyDeleteWith few exceptions (the shining), the book should never be read before the movie. There are some things, without making a fuck of miniseries (dune) that film can convey.
ReplyDelete-Josh