HP:HBP Rant

Yeah, I know, this is a month late to say any­thing about Harry Pot­ter and the Half Blood Prince, but I just saw it last night. I really expected the nor­mal dis­ap­point­ment at see­ing a well writ­ten book trans­lated to film. As usual, I was care­ful not to read too much ahead of time, so as to spoil my enjoy­ment. My antic­i­pa­tion wasn’t very high.  I was hop­ing for good enough. Kinda like Gob­let of Fire.  Instead, I’d say the movie rated about a D.  That’s not good enough.  It’s only a pass­ing grade because it hit enough of the cru­cial plot points that I sup­pose there’s a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the next two movies.

I would quit watch­ing the Harry Pot­ter movies by now if I hadn’t read the books. But hav­ing read the books, some­how I can’t tear my eyes away from the train wreck. Just so you know, in the book, there’s crazy stuff about the freak­ing HALF BLOOD PRINCE in and also Lord Volde­mort and some other appar­ently unim­por­tant junk. The book is the most pow­er­ful of the series, I think. But some­how this movie was utterly bor­ing! For such an emo­tional book, too!  I cried at the end, but only because I knew what it should have been, so I cared about what was hap­pen­ing. Or really, what should have been happening.

Did J.K. Rowl­ing just quit with the input?  I remem­ber when they were mak­ing the first few, she’d insist cer­tain seem­ingly unim­por­tant details be kept in because they were cru­cial to the story line.  Did she decide to just quit once the last book came out, fig­ur­ing that now that the whole story was out there, any idiot would know not to give Bel­la­trix 4th billing?   Or to cut out all those pesky bits of infor­ma­tion about Snape, Harry’s par­ents, or most all of the stuff about Voldy’s child­hood?  They even cut out the inter­est­ing bits of the love sto­ries, and left us with half a movie about how annoy­ing Laven­der was!

Flat out dis­ap­pointed, even going in with low expectations.