Mere Musings

It was a well-made film and all — I liked the score, the special effects were fine, and the acting has only gotten progressively better with each movie — but I feel like it really suffered from being-the-first-half-of-something syndrome. Unlike entries in a proper series (e.g., A New Hope, Fellowship of the Ring), Part 1 didn’t really work as a self-contained film. And while I get the argument that “it just reminded me how boring much of the book was,” I think that was okay (not ideal, but tolerable) in the book because:

(A) you were enthralled by the world that J.K. Rowling had created, and you wanted to spend as much time as possible in it because you knew it would all be “over” soon; and

(B) if you did find part of the book boring, all you had to do was get through that part (say, the next fifty or hundred pages), and things would start happening.

That’s not an option with the films. Part 1 kinda just ended — there wasn’t really a traditional rising action/climax/denouement structure to it, which is to be expected, but even so, it didn’t really go anywhere — and now, Warner Bros. is making viewers wait eight months for the payoff to what amounted to 146 minutes of build-up. And by splitting the film up in this manner, they’ve doubled their revenue but have also put themselves behind the eight-ball: Part 1 isn’t a very good film when evaluated on its own merits, which puts that much more pressure on Part 2 to be one hell of a series closer in order to make up for its directionless predecessor.

It’s probably better for both the producers and series fans that they did it this way, as opposed to making one three- or four-hour film that cut way too much from the book, but even so … I’m left feeling underwhelmed, to say the least. Even if you say that the job of Part 1 is to leave you anticipating Part 2, I don’t think it did that job very well.

I’m still definitely going to see it, of course, and I hope that they can pull it off.

[Edit: I did really like the animation for Hermione’s reading of “The Tale of the Three Brothers.”]