3 Short Paragraphs: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2009, David Yates -- download

At this point in watching the series, I was deep in the throes of my lung infection, constantly feverish and very very tired.  The consistent exposure to the magic of the movies made me feel like I was watching a regular TV show, one that was just very very intense and expensively done.  And like a TV series, there were episodes that as a whole, were not very memorable, but had scenes and plot points that were. But still, it felt like filler.  This was one such, for me.

The crux of the story is that Harry has found a text book once owned by "the half blood prince", the identify of whom is a mystery. Still the book helps Harry out in many key ways in class, if adding a bit of darkness to Harry's personality.  Annoying me was that the reveal of the owner of the book contributed nothing to the ongoing plot, just adding some additional ooooooo-drama.  The point of the movie is that we are being led to (SPOILER ALERT !  even after all these years) the death of Dumbledore, which is engineered to steel Harry in the coming battle.  I found all the extraneous story elements, like Ron and his nutty girlfriend and Snape's defence of Draco to be unneeded.  But as I imagine it was based on one of Rowling's tome sized books, I imagine there was a lot of material to convey, in fear of pissing off the loyal readers.

As for the memorable scenes?  The introduction of the latest temp instructor, as he emerges from the disguise as an arm chair still makes me grin.  The scene at the beginning where Harry gets a vision of himself if he was a normal boy, with a waitress showing interest in him, is a nice touch and solidifies that Harry is not meant for normality in any sense.  And while the destruction of the Weasley house pained me, it showed the danger of the Death Eaters.  IMO, we should have seen them doing much much more.  Such as the attack on the Millenium Bridge, we are now shown that Voldemort will not shy away from attacks on Muggles. Unfortunately the ending, where Dumbledore is murdered by Snape and Harry can do naught but watch, was a bit of anti-climax because they machinations leading to such were so obvious.  All this movie ended up doing was making me ask very insistently, "So, do we have the others downloaded?"  Unfortunately we had crappy copies, so it was a few days before we wrapped up the series.