![]() If the director's defining trademark on the series so far was to ably cut down on excess while getting the story across unscathed, he proves by giving himself the space to breathe that, while he is still not cut out for the magical side of Harry Potter, he is abundantly capable of doing the one thing that no previous Potter film has managed: delve into the characters. More than that, he corrected what has been horribly wrong with the film franchise. I say all of this negative stuff to come to a surprising conclusion: David Yates got it right this time. There's nothing of the sort to be found in Yates' films, which suck the feeling of wonder from Hogwarts - this was particularly evident in The Half-Blood Prince, which intriguingly dug beneath the oppressive and despairing tone of Rowling's best novel to find the feeling of appreciation and nostalgia for that which will soon be lost in the coming war, only to bungle this fascinating insight with a drab visual style. Of course, fans don't know what they want, and it's interesting that the only fully successful adaptation of Rowling's books, Prisoner of Azkaban, owes its power to sacrificing the familiar plot elements to reach for a more magical and unpredictable atmosphere. Even The Order of the Phoenix, the longest and most meandering of the books, was whittled down to one of the shortest running times of any of the franchise movies without sacrificing the core of the work.Įrgo, his decision to split Deathly Hallows into two parts speaks less to the overflow of great ideas in Rowling's epic than a misguided attempt to use the final entry to give fans what fans always want: the entire book transposed to screen. Yates' biggest contribution to the three Potter films he's helmed has been his commitment to retaining as much as possible of the novels while still releasing films at acceptable blockbuster length. Pacing problems mired the first half in directionless muck, wallowing in dystopic Holocaust/post-9/11 allegory until exposition suddenly kicked in and never let up until the end (even the epilogue, which I found deeply unsatisfactory even on the first read, summarizes the futures of the characters with banal resolution). ![]() What I saw upon a second reading, however, was the weakest book of the series since it moved into darker territory in the third entry. Absorbed by the action, I plowed through 759 pages in mere hours, sad to see these characters slipping away even as I propelled myself toward the end with breakneck speed. When I devoured the closing chapter of Harry Potter's saga as an 18-year-old leaving high school just as the most visible pop culture symbol of my childhood came to a close, I loved every page. Rowling's final entry (one hopes) in her wildly successful series. The problems inherent in the film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows are the issues inherent in J.K. This would not be entirely Yates' fault, mind you there are fundamental flaws in the story that cannot be blamed on anyone involved with the production. ![]() Having re-read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows before seeing the first half of the story in David Yates' latest, I entered the cineplex ready to dub the latest adaptation of the most popular book franchise in the world Harry Potter and the Interminable Holocaust Allegory.
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