Harry Potter and That Guy (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 Review)

I have a confession to make.  For every Harry Potter film to hit the theaters so far, I've been that guy.  You know that guy.  You know him all too well.  Just before the movie's release, he reads the corresponding book so that he'll know exactly what was changed for the theaters.  He was very pleased with the first two films, horrified with the third, and increasingly annoyed with the fourth, fifth, and sixth.  Yes, I was that douchebag.  I was at my worst with the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where the movie ended on a Cliff's Notes version of an outstanding action sequence that blew me away the first time I read it.  I was the guy who complained about the omission of Hermione's "S.P.E.W." organization in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, even though I didn't even like the subplot in the book.  I was the guy who could taste stomach bile in the back of his throat when the Rastafarian shrunken head first graced the screen on the Knight Bus at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

I thought about seeking therapy.  I thought about boycotting the movies and clinging desperately to the moments of pure awesome found on the pages but not at the local Cinemark.  I reread key scenes, like the huge fight sequence at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and memorized the names of important characters who never made it into the films (here's looking at you, Charlie Weasley!).  I considered personally petitioning Chris Columbus to come back to the helm and right the ship.

Karma came back and gave me a nasty turn by sending me to the hospital with what turned out to be mono literally half an hour after grumbling my way out of the theater of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  It was after that that I started to wonder if maybe being that guy wasn't such a good idea after all.  Upon seeing the first trailers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, my buddy Professor Goodtimes explained to me that he actually hated the first two films and has loved the rest, and he hates it when people compare books to their movie adaptations because you simply cannot compare items from two different forms of media.  I happen to disagree - we got into a few rather heated arguments over this - but it did make me think.  Movies cannot be word-for-word translations of a book.  Books simply have different pacing than a movie.  They can explain in a sentence what would take several minutes of film.  Humorous scenes in a novel can fall horribly flat on the big screen.  Comparisons between a book and its movie counterpart can be interesting studies of media, but they shouldn't make fans feel cheated out of certain superfluous scenes or characters, as I had long felt.

And so it was that, for the first time ever, I did not reread the corresponding book for the corresponding Harry Potter film.  My first steps down the path of redemption had begun.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 picks up right where HP6 left off.  Right from the getgo, HP7.1 is dark.  Very dark.  Dumbledore was killed by Severus Snape.  Harry has learned that Voldemort split his soul into seven pieces, with each piece encapsulated in something called a "Horcrux", which could be any old item like a diary, locket, teddy bear, etc.  The wizarding world is at war.  Hermione "obliterates" all traces of her parents' memory of her to protect them.  The Dursleys are forced to leave their home, and when Harry does the same, he is accompanied by an honor guard of no less than about a dozen major characters (including the hastily-introduced Bill Weasley and his hastily-explained werewolf scratch and his hastily-explained engagement to Fleur, the attractive French girl from the fourth HP film).  They get Harry to the Weasley's house and prepare for the wedding of Bill and Fleur, but all hell breaks loose when the Ministry of Magic is overrun by Voldemort and his Death Eaters, and as the wedding gets crashed, our three heroes escape to London and begin their quest to hunt down the Horcruxes and destroy them.

This film will feel pretty different from the last few because they made the wise choice of splitting the book in half.  Regardless of how I feel about the books, movies 4, 5, and 6 were very fast-paced and rarely, if ever, gave you any down-time to stop and think about what was going on.  Subsequently, HP7.1 may feel slow for some.  Harry, Ron, and Hermione spend the movie away from Hogwarts, their friends, and their families, and while their character development and group dynamic was interesting, it does take a dedicated viewer to really enjoy two-and-a-half hours centered almost exclusively around the three kids.  One of my personal favorite characters in all the films and books is Hogwarts itself.  The school has such a unique personality to it that you come to feel like it is a character in its own right, and its exclusion, while necessary for the plot, is a huge letdown, though of course that's not the movie's fault.

That being said, this was probably the best Harry Potter film to come out in a long time.  The three kids are those characters, and the rest of the casting is so spot on that you would think Rowling had those very actors in mind when writing their parts.  The special effects are of course as top-notch as can be, and the settings are varied enough to keep your eyes interested while the characters sit around talking about Voldemort's creepy self-soul-mangling.

The only problem I had with HP7.1 - and this is me retaining a little bit of my "that guy" persona - is that it wasn't set up well enough by the previous movies.  There were too many instances of "oh by the way I'm so-and-so and I'm suddenly important", most notably the two-second introduction of Ron's elder brother Bill and his utterly out-of-nowhere engagement with Fleur Delacour AND his encounter with a werewolf at some point in his life that was only bad enough to give him the occasional craving for raw meat.  I understand that the filmmakers didn't want to include the big fight at the end of HP6, as it (SPOILER ALERT!) would have born too close a resemblance to the big fight at the end of HP7, (END SPOILER ALERT!) but the fight at the end of HP6 was a huge part of setting up this all-important wedding, so from a storyteller's perspective, not from an anal HP fan's perspective, that was simply sloppy moviemaking on their part.

Also sloppy was their dealing with Harry's and Ginny's relationship.  Harry knows that he has to leave Hogwarts, track down Voldemort's soul shards, and most likely die in the process, so in the books he forces Ginny away to protect her, even though she was strong/badass enough to never really believe him.  But in this film the two enjoy a nice little makeout session just prior to the wedding, and as Harry spends the rest of the time touring England, he never once mentions her or gives the slightest inclination that he actually cares for her.  Sloppy moviemaking, regardless of what has ever happened in the original material.  From the film I can only assume that Harry doesn't give a grindylow's ass about this girl, which makes me like Harry a bit less.

Mostly, though, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 is nothing more than one enormous setup for Part 2, so go into this one knowing that you will have almost no resolution until next July.  Don't take your kiddos - I am a firm believer that you should be at least Harry's age per film/book before viewing/reading.  The filmmakers have set themselves up for some outlandishly high expectations, and I can only hope that Part 2 delivers.  I hereby solemnly swear, though, that I will NOT attempt to reread the seventh book prior to Part 2's release.  I am that guy, no more.

BONUS!  We saw the movie at Alamo Drafthouse, which, among other things, introduced me to this excellent Youtube video from Tobuscus.  Enjoy, and be sure to check out his other one about TRON: Legacy, which I will almost definitely post in my upcoming review.