Saturday night we went to an “18 & over” (hurrah for no kids!) showing of the latest Harry Potter movie. Now, I’ve loved all the movies so far, and read all the books multiple times (they’re some of my “comfort” books that I re-read when I’m down).
I was disappointed with this one. I’ll put the reasons why under a cut.
All the movies have left massive chunks of the books out – natural, I suppose, when some of them are just so huge. We all have our favourite bits that we moan about being left out of the movie – one of my pet peeves (ha, ha) is that they cut all Rick Mayall’s bits out of the first one, and never wrote Peeves back into any of the others.
But on this installment, they left out a pretty freakin’ huge battle scene which was the climax of the book. What the hell? That was important – Death Eaters are rampaging through the halls of Hogwarts, felling students and staff? And they left it out? I know that they had to spend time on all the teen angst and snogging bits (and I loved all that), but really.
Hagrid had a few split seconds here and there, but was pretty much forgotten.
Fred and George’s FREAKING COOL SHOP featured for about 45 seconds. God knows what that shop cost to do, both in budget and in manpower, and it was gorgeous. I wanted more.
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the Weasley’s house wasn’t destroyed by Death Eaters in the book.Why would they have? Arthur Weasley is such a huge threat to the Dark Lord?
Dumbledore’s death seemed a bit empty to me…I expected to be crying at that point.
The moment in the subterranean lake when the arms shot out of the water was perfect – people screamed all over the theatre (and remember, this was an adults-only showing) and the lady next to us threw popcorn everywhere.
Overall, it was pretty and dark and well done except for the last scenes, which really bothered me.