CinePhillyist Reviews... Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Of course, fans of the books are already very familiar with the plot I just summarized. What they're most likely wondering is, is this film faithful to the source material? The answer is... not exactly. Certainly all the major plot points are here, and they're all handled very well. But, as with any book-to-film adaptation, a lot has had to be cut out. The trouble with that in this case is that J.K. Rowling's plots are rather complex and intricate things. If you start pulling stuff out and moving stuff around and adding new stuff, you can very quickly end up with something that barely makes sense anymore. (Spoilers abound for the rest of this paragraph, so those who haven't read the book, and/or those who don't want to know anything about the movie might want to skip ahead.) Take the "Half-Blood Prince" of the title, for instance. Because a lot of the build-up surrounding this character has been removed, the revelation of his identity at the end of the film has lost a lot of its effectiveness. Also, Malfoy spends the entire film fiddling with a magic cabinet that finally gets used in the climactic sequence. But all his preparation seems pointless in the movie, as none of the people who travel through the cabinet end up doing anything important at all. Instead, their purposes are carried out by people who were already in the school, and who, it seems clear, could have done it all without them. One of the changes that's most difficult to swallow is that in the film, Harry has not been magically paralyzed during the final confrontation between the villains and Dumbledore. But only a magical paralysis could explain why he does nothing at all when said villains enter and attack his mentor and father figure.

But despite some confusing and poorly thought-out changes, the film is mostly successful. I've already mentioned how excellent the performances of the young actors are, but the adults are universally excellent, as well. I particularly enjoy Helena Bonham Carter's insane, menacing Bellatrix Lestrange and Alan Rickman's complex, layered Severus Snape. Visually, the film is spectacular. The filmmakers have chosen an extremely muted color palette this time around; nearly everything is white or black or gray, as if to accentuate the sense of mounting doom and melancholy. But the muted palette doesn't detract at all from the beauty and power of the cinematography.

You might think that those of us who have read the book, and who therefore know what's coming at the end of the movie, would find it rather boring, but if anything the opposite is true. From the moment that Harry and Dumbledore arrived at the seaside cave, I found my stomach twisted in knots of tension, queasy with dread at what was to come. The sequence inside the cave is particularly effective, full of breathtaking visuals, terrifying monsters, and horrifically clever traps. Watching Harry pour that awful potion down Dumbledore's throat is pure agony, and the final tragedy of the film is absolutely wrenching. The moment after, when all the students and teachers raised their lit wands to the sky, brought to mind for me a rather unfortunate and silly association (a crowd holding up lighters at a rock show), but despite that I still found it an extremely moving scene. The very end of the movie—which features our heroes standing around talking about how they've achieved nothing, followed by a swift fade to black—is a bit frustrating and anticlimactic. But then again, so was the end of the book. This episode is mostly just setup for the concluding chapter, so of course it's got to leave us wanting more.

But I don't want to give the impression the film is all fear and doom and pain. For much of its length, it's actually very warm and very funny. The filmmakers and performers really understand these characters—characters who by now are all like old friends to us—and have really made them come alive on the screen. Indeed, the focus of the film is very strongly on the characters and their relationships with each other (sometimes at the expense of the plot), and much fun and silliness comes out of this.

Audience members who go into this film hoping for a strict, textually accurate adaptation of J.K. Rowling's novel will be disappointed. And indeed there are some legitimate complaints to be made about the way writer Steve Kloves and director David Yates have made free with the source material. But in the end, Kloves and Yates have captured the spirit and the essence of the book and turned it into an effective and entertaining film. It's hard to ask for much more than that.

Image via Internet Movie Poster Awards Gallery