Overall Rating: 8.9
I have a few complaints regarding the pacing and tone of the movie...and I'm sure my co-author, who has actually read the entire book series, rather than merely the first two books and excerpts from the rest, will have other comments (which I would request she contribute in comment form below this post). But the general reaction has to be: fantastic artistic presentation, visually stunning, and relatively true to the books.
Plot Synopsis:
I am not going to attempt to detail the plot for this blog. You have either read the books and know what happens or you have seen the movie and...really don't. That is the beef I have with it.
The Skinny:
I have one major question for David Yates - why attempt to make HP7B into the second shortest movie in the entire franchise? None of the predecessor movies with the exception of HP2 (The Chamber of Secrets) whose plot was the thinnest in the lot have come in under 2:25. But this one...the one that has to make all of the events of the entire story fit together into a neat little package...is 2:10. And not with complete disclosure of events. I don't mean to sound overly harsh, but the big reveal from Snape's tears needed to show us more...much much MUCH more. It's a good thing that my co-author has told me a lot about Snape's motivations over the years or I'd have never known that Potter used to pick on Snape...that Snape was defended by Lilith...that he thereafter fell in love with her.
Without prior knowledge of events, I got no hint of why Snape entered his bargain with Dumbledore, no understanding of why the Elder Wand didn't work for Snape, and didn't feel the emotional impact of the deaths of the Weasley twin, the other Hogwarts students or Remus and Tonks Loopin...because they only showed us who they were for about five seconds each and that wasn't enough for me to recognize them. And other than a very nice bit of acting by Maggie Smith (McGonagall), they did absoltuely nothing to show us how the other characters felt after the battle.
The end felt a bit perfunctory as well...the book included a great confrontation between Voldemort and Harry before their final wand duel in which the reason he would lose was explained with all of the students watching. The movie had none of that...the final wand duel took about 15 seconds and his death made no sense to me. They killed his pet snake (the final horcrux) and then a simple attack and disarm spell made him crumble like leaves in the wind? You know...when you beat the bad guy in an action movie, the crowd should be cheering...there should be a "YEAAAH!!!!!" moment...there was in the book...the students saw the end! Why did they choose to take that out of the movie? It really makes that duel seem anticlimactic. The YEAH! moment was the killing of the snake...but...that somehow doesn't seem right (even though I love Neville to death).
Having said all of that, the central themes of the books survived intact and the story was gorgeously told. Yates has a real eye for understated beauty in the way he tells his story, and all of the actors...every last one of them...has matured into extremely gifted performers. One of the major problems with the early movies was the weak acting of the child stars of the franchise (all except perhaps Emma Watson, who was strong very early on). David Radcliffe and company have greatly improved as they've grown into their roles. Like the readers of the original book series and the characters within the story, the actors became adults...and it shows. I now invite my sister to write an essay on the moral and character themes in the book series for this blog under our literature banner...those themes made it nicely to the big screen.
Writing: 6.0
The decision to turn the seventh book into, essentially, a 4.5 hour movie was a good one...unfortunately, the way those 4.5 hours were divided was unwise and limited the effectiveness of the story. We needed HP7A to be the 2-hour movie, not HP7B.
Acting: 9.5
We knew that Maggie Smith was a pro (and she showed it this year, once again), but the children have all grown up and become masters of their craft.
Artistic Direction and Technical Mastery: 10.0
Like HP7A, this film is beautiful to behold, the music is effective, and Yates proves that he's a brilliant director when it comes to telling the story, once the script is written.
Message: 10.0
In our dark impulses - our desire to conquer death, our desire for power and control, our desire for acceptance and for love at any cost - we sew the seeds of our own destruction. Snape brought his fate upon himself (despite the best of intentions)...and of course, so did Voldemort. This was the leading theme of HP7B (well...apart from the truth that love is what makes life worth living and the only effective weapon against unchecked hate)...but a more complete description of the themes of the entire Harry Potter franchise is (I hope) forthcoming.
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