Nearly ten years ago, on this very website, I wrote a piece of drivel about Harry Potter. It was at a time when I wrote a lot for the website, not all of it very good. (In fact, not much of it very good. Actually, not any of it very good, if I’m honest.) Even taking into account the poor standards of my writing, this was not one of the better articles, and it only narrowly avoided being deleted when Heath the Rat’s Silly Page moved onto the nesthole.com address.
This article, therefore, seeks to redress the disservice that Harry Potter has been given on this website. It seems an opportune moment to do so – after all, that first article was written shortly before I saw the first Harry Potter film, and this article is being written shortly after I saw the last film. It seems quite neat, to me at least, if not anyone else.
To be honest, part of my badly expressed point in that article was a fear that by the seventh book, J K Rowling might be churning out rubbish books and simply knowing that they would sell because they were labelled Harry Potter. Unfortunately, I fear I have to say now that I believe I was absolutely right. I thought the book of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was rambling and bizarrely structured – virtually nothing happens for the first two-thirds of the book, then suddenly everything happens in a jampacked final few chapters. It seemed very odd to me.
When I heard the news that the Deathly Hallows was going to be split into two for the film adaptation, I have to say I was a little surprised, given all the important bits in the book are already nicely compressed into a short space of time. Frankly, of all the Harry Potter books that could have been split into two, this is probably the least deserving candidate. But anyway, like the rest of Planet Earth, I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 at the cinema last November or whenever it was, and I have to admit I came away impressed.
(It’s probably a good moment for me to point out that I have been generally unimpressed by the Harry Potter films. The first two I consider completely unwatchable, mostly due to the actors appearing to be only 2 years old, but from the third one onwards they suddenly seemed to grow up. I liked the third film, enough to buy it on DVD, though of course, having done this, I’ve never watched it again. The fourth one is largely worthwhile only to see Doctor Who pop up in the final moments and stick his tongue out like a mentalist, and the fifth one did a reasonable job of adapting what is an utterly pointless book. I went to see the sixth one three times, bizarrely, so I suppose I must have thought it was okay, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it again. So, to summarise, I think it’s been a decidedly mediocre run of films, despite some excellent acting – Helena Bonham Carter especially, I’m looking at you.)
Anyway, so I liked Part 1. (Again, though, I won’t be watching it again anytime soon.) It was therefore with a vague sense of optimism that I went to the cinema on Wednesday. (I will only go to the cinema on Wednesdays – pay £7.60 for a film? I don’t think so. Orange Wednesdays all the way.)
Unfortunately, I must report that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is not my favourite film. It’s at a disadvantage to start with, given the book itself is a bit rubbish, but since all the good bits of the book fall within this film, it should have been better than Part 1. It’s not.
It opens with Harry and his gang striking a deal with a goblin to get into the wizarding bank. There’s some good action bits involving breaking into a vault and flying out on a dragon, and an inevitable betrayal by the goblin. Then Harry and his friends decide that they have to go back to Hogwarts school to confront the baddies there, and also to find the remaining Horcruxes. (I’m going to assume you know what I’m talking about – I can’t be bothered to explain Horcruxes. Though, thinking about it, it would probably have taken less effort to explain them that it has done to type this diversion about not being bothered to explain them. But do I care? No, I do not.)
It’s all terribly exciting for a little while, so naturally I’m not going to dwell on the bits that I thought were quite good. It’s about an hour in that it goes bad – and when it goes bad, it’s irredeemable. Do you remember how cheesy the last half hour of The Lord of the Rings was? Gandalf sitting in a chair laughing his fool head, Frodo sitting up in bed while the other three hobbits bounced on it like nutters, and Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas walking into the room trying to look cool and just looking like twats (especially Legolas)? Yes, well, Harry Potter is about on that level.
So, okay, Harry’s walking through the forest to confront Voldemort with absolutely no plan (we won’t discuss that particular breach of logic), when suddenly, for no apparent reason, the ghosts of his mother, father, Sirius Black and Remus Lupin appear. Putting aside the fact that – as far as I can remember – Remus Lupin isn’t even dead by this stage of the film, it makes no sense. (Never mind that it happens in the book too – it doesn’t make any sense there either, and it would have been sensible for the filmmakers to ignore it.)
Harry’s mother does most of the talking, while his dad lurks in the background (for some time, I thought his dad was wearing some entirely inappropriate Matrix-style shades, though that sadly turned out to be a trick of the light). Harry says things like, “Why are you here?” (which is a damned good question), and his mother responds sickeningly, “We’ve always been here,” and points at Harry’s heart. It made me want to tear up my seat and hurl it at the screen. The scene goes on in similar vein for a while – including close-ups of Lupin’s massively smarmy grin and Sirius’ stupid miscast face – and at no point are the ghosts explained, nor do they do anything. Why are they there? I hate them. It wouldn’t be so bad if they actually did something, or helped Harry achieve something, but they don’t. They just stand about wasting time being cheesy and irritating, then disappear shortly before Harry actually confronts Voldemort.
And then Harry comes to see Voldemort. He immediately gets shot with some magic and dies. This results in him going to a very very white place, where he meets the ghost of Professor Dumbledore (who, we will recall, died in the sixth book). Harry claims the white place looks like King’s Cross station, which is a transparent deception. If anything, it looks like the place where Captain Sisko goes to meet the wormhole aliens in the more boring episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 – that is to say, a plain white place.
There follows about five minutes of interminable conversation between Harry and Dumbledore, which veers wildly between more cheesy rubbish of the nature Harry only recently had with the other ghosts (“you brave, brave boy, Harry!” exclaims Dumbledore, for example) and some pseudo-philosophical claptrap which is, astoundingly, more annoying than the cheesiness (“Is this real, Professor, or is it only happening in my head?” asks Harry; “Of course it’s in your head, Harry,” replies Dumbledore, smugly, “but why should that mean it isn’t real?”).
By the time Harry returns to the real world, I’d lost all interest. Ra ra ra, Ron and Hermione find some Horcruxes, ra ra ra, there’s a big fight, ra ra ra, Voldemort rather randomly takes the piss out of Neville Longbottom, ra ra ra, Harry shoots Voldemort and kills him. A few of the goodies are killed too, but it’s very difficult to care (especially since one of them is Fred or George Weasley, who are annoying in the books and did not improve by being translated to film with two of the worst actors in the world).
However, the film did briefly redeem itself around about this point, albeit unintentionally. The battle is won, and Harry, Ron and Hermione are wandering around the ruins of Hogwarts. They’re standing on the remains of the big stone bridge over a massive drop into a valley, and for no apparent reason Harry runs right up to the edge and jumps onto a block of stone, then turns round and tries to look dead hard. Unfortunately, when I saw him running up to the edge, the thought popped into my head, “Wouldn’t it be funny if he tripped and fell into the ravine?” Admittedly, this wouldn’t be all that funny in the grand scheme of things, but at the time, I was quite taken with the notion and in fact started having silent hysterics in the cinema. It was one of those terrible moments where you know that if you laugh, it’s extremely inappropriate, and that makes you want to laugh more. And the way I was bottling it up, I knew that if a laugh did burst out, it wouldn’t be just a quiet chuckle, it would be a proper full-bodied loud and quite possibly mental hoot.
Luckily, I managed to stifle it, but it nearly burst out again mere seconds later, when the film cut ahead to 19 years in the future. Hilariously, they tried to convince the viewer that the actors were 19 years older simply by sticking some unconvincing beards on them, even the women (I’m joking, of course). Draco Malfoy in particular looked like he had a rubbish 1970s spy movie disguise on. This was funny enough that I was just about able to overlook the cheesiness of this scene, which dealt with Harry waving his children off to school. I’m sure it would have made me want to vomit if I’d actually listened to the dialogue, but since I was merely laughing at the beards, it was tolerable.
So, in conclusion, this film is not a classic. But if you want a chuckle at the really crap bits, and the bridge bit, it’s well recommended. However, if you only want to see it for those reasons, it’s probably best to wait for the DVD.