Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince opened in theaters a week ago; and while we were not insane enough to go to the midnight opening, we did go see it a few days later to give the crowd a chance to die down. It was still pretty crowded when we went on the following Thursday night but at least it wasn’t insanely crowded and we managed to get good seats front row center.
I have three daughters who grew up with Harry Potter. We read the first book aloud because my youngest daughter could not read yet and they have been hooked ever since then. We’ve read all the books and are re-reading them again. We’ve seen all the movies and just can’t get enough of them. This latest installment though, kind of left us flat. Which is unusual for us because we are such Harry Potter fans that we pretty much eat up anything Harry Potter that is doled out.
Right off the bat, during the introductory scenes of the movie, where the dementors demolish a bridge in London, they started to lose me. I was frantically trying to remember if this was in the book and my old mind just overlooked it. By this time my girls were like, “What the heck is going on? Where is this movie going?”. My 11 year old was furiously tugging on my arm going “That was not in the book!”. LOL! I guess we must all be purists. We don’t want too many additions nor omissions from the original plot.
Another deviation from the book that also had me and the girls going ‘HUH?’ was the attack on the Weasley farm house. You’d think the Norwich and Peterborough building society had invaded the wizarding world. In the movie, the Weasley’s house burns down during an attack from the fire eaters. As the whole family stood in a circle watching the burrow on fire, my only thought besides from ‘WTH???’ is, ‘I wonder if wizards carry home insurance? LOL! They were really losing my interest at this point.
The saving grace for this movie for me (and also my girls) is how the relationships between Harry & Ginny and Ron & Hermione were developed more in this movie. Forget it that they totally forgot to put focus on the title of the movie, ‘The Half-Blood Prince’ which was only mentioned once (I think) in the movie and if you didn’t read the book you still come away wondering what the significance of the half-blood prince was.
Overall, I felt really unsatisfied with The Half-Blood Prince. I kept waiting for the action to pick up which it never did. This is the first time this has ever happened with me and a Harry Potter movie. So now I want to see it again because I desperately want to like it. It has gotten good reviews elsewhere so I’m thinking maybe I had the wrong expectations going into the movie. I know I’ll be getting the DVD to complete our collection when it comes out. I just don’t know if I can wait that long to see the movie again because it really bothers me that I didn’t like it.
Tags: Harry Potter
July 30th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
http://pinayhekmi.pansitan.net/?p=695 My harry potter vent.
I don’t think I need the movies to be exactly like the book. For example, Prisoner of Azkaban was such a departure from the book but its my favorite.
I’m not sure if my other comment went through. But I think that the book was SOO GOOD, we can’t help but be disappointed with the film version. I’m pretty much sure that nothing will live up to the last book. JK Rowling just did a phenomenal job tying everything together.