Always have to ruin everything

[trinityvixen]

I hope my friends and the internet won't crucify me for saying it, but I didn't really like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. Look, I had low expectations. Every Harry Potter movie has been okay. They're not as good as the books ever, and I'm okay with that. The movies did have the potential, however, to do Rowling one better, especially the later movies, since they had the chance to go and add things to make up for the fact that she did not do that and got all the way to book six without mentioning horcruxes. I'm sorry they didn't take the chance to improve where they could. Film is an incredibly potent medium for conveying devastating emotion. I didn't really feel anything, about any of the events in the movie. The last Harry Potter book made me cry. This last Harry Potter film made me indifferent.

More than anything, the second movie felt like an unnecessary cash-grab instead of a movie that stood on its own. The first Deathly Hallows installment did have something of a climax and resolution structure and could, as much as any of the other movies in the series, stood on its own at least as well as the rest of them (so long as you assumed something else was coming). This one, in words of moonlightalice felt like just an extended climax, and a very anticlimactic one at that.

I assume that the positive responses I've seen are almost nostalgia/sentiment driven, not that there's anything wrong with that--you are free to enjoy it, and I'm glad some have. I just felt like it was a let down, and I hadn't really built up any hopes on it, so I didn't exactly have high expectations to crash. Unlike, say, the extreme level of hopes I have in Captain America, coming out this week. A preview trailer for The Avengers leaked, and I'm now doubly excited. Stupid hope, why do you have to spring eternal?

Comments

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. Like I said, I haven't seen this one yet. But it's got to be a tough balance, figuring out what to keep and what to change and what to drop. Hard enough when converting a movie to a book, but a huge-ass book to a movie? Worlds harder.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I would agree with you except that I think a lot of the bulk of the series is easily excised without losing either world-building or plot. There's plenty you can cut or gloss over without losing the thread of the plot.

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

There is, and I feel like, in the seven movies I did see, they managed exactly that--well, really in #3-7. Some things are obvious to cut, like Tom Bombadil in LotR. Other details get a lot trickier, esp. if they're deeply interwoven.