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Dusty: I have seen your heart and it is mine. I have seen your dreams, protentional subscriber, and I have seen your fears…
This film is based on J. K. Rowling’s 2007 novel of the same name, and both are the seventh installments of their respective mediums from the Harry Potter franchise. The film version of Rowling’s seventh book is divided into two parts.
Rating: PG-13
Director: David Yates
Writers: J.K. Rowling, Steve Kloves
Stars: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint
Release Date: November 19, 2010 (United States)
Run time: 2 hours, 26 minutes
THE PLOT:
via wiki:
At Malfoy Manor, Severus Snape meets with Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters. He reports that the Order of the Phoenix will move Harry Potter, no longer under his mother’s protective spell, to a safe location. Voldemort confiscates Lucius Malfoy‘s wand; his own is powerless against Harry because it and Harry’s wand are “brothers” by sharing the same phoenix feather core. During the move, Harry survives Voldemort’s attack, but Mad-Eye Moody and Hedwig are killed.
During preparations for Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour‘s wedding, the new Minister for Magic Rufus Scrimgeour arrives. He informs Harry, Ron, and Hermione that Albus Dumbledore left each a bequest: Ron a Deluminator, Hermione a copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, and Harry the Golden Snitch he caught in his first Quidditch match. Dumbledore also bequeathed the Sword of Gryffindor to Harry, but it has gone missing.
News arrives during the wedding that the Ministry has fallen and Scrimgeour is dead. Death Eaters attack, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione escape to Number 12, Grimmauld Place. While there, Ron realises that Sirius’ brother, Regulus Black, is the R.A.B. who stole Salazar Slytherin’s locket from Voldemort. Local thief Mundungus Fletcher later sold it to Dolores Umbridge. Harry, Ron, and Hermione infiltrate the Ministry and recover the locket, but they are chased by Death Eaters in a chaotic exit. Hermione disapparates them to a forest. Meanwhile, Ron is injured. The trio decides to start their journey to discover and destroy all of Voldemort’s Horcruxes, beginning with the locket.
Attempts to destroy the locket fail. Hermione deduces that Gryffindor’s sword can destroy Horcruxes because it is impregnated with basilisk venom. Ron, affected by the dark locket, is frustrated with their slow progress and irrationally jealous of Harry and Hermione. He argues with Harry then leaves. When Harry touches the Snitch to his lips, it reveals a cryptic message: “I open at the close.” Hermione notices a strange symbol drawn in Beedle the Bard that is identical to one Luna Lovegood‘s father Xenophilius wears.
Harry and Hermione search for the sword in Godric’s Hollow and encounter the same strange symbol in a cemetery. Elderly historian Bathilda Bagshot invites them in her cottage, where they find a photo of the young man in Harry’s dream who stole a wand from wandmaker Gregorovitch. Bathilda morphs into Voldemort’s snake Nagini and attacks Harry. Hermione disapparates them to safety, but her rebounding spell accidentally destroys Harry’s wand. Hermione identifies the man in the photo as dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald. That night, a doe patronus leads Harry to a frozen pond where Gryffindor’s sword lies on the bottom. Harry dives into the frigid water, but the locket around his neck tightens, strangling him. Ron appears, retrieves the sword, and saves Harry. They destroy the locket Horcrux with the sword. Ron explains that the Deluminator led him to their location.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione visit Xenophilius Lovegood and learn the symbol represents the Deathly Hallows. Many years before, three brothers each received a prize that evades Death: the Resurrection Stone, the Cloak of Invisibility, and the Elder Wand, the most powerful wand known. Possessing all three makes one the Master of Death. Xenophilius secretly summons the Death Eaters, hoping to exchange Harry for a kidnapped Luna. The three escape, but Snatchers capture them. During a vision, Harry sees an elderly Grindelwald telling Voldemort that the Elder Wand is buried with Dumbledore.
At Malfoy Manor, Bellatrix Lestrange sees a Snatcher with Gryffindor’s sword that she believed was in her Gringotts vault. Harry and Ron are locked into the cellar, where they encounter Luna, Ollivander, and Griphook. Upstairs, Bellatrix tortures Hermione. Harry begs for help using a mirror shard in which he believes he glimpsed Dumbledore; Dobby appears in response and helps save everyone while Harry grabs their captured wands from Draco Malfoy. As they disapparate, Bellatrix throws a knife, killing Dobby. Harry buries him near Bill and Fleur’s seaside cottage, an Order safe house. Meanwhile, Voldemort retrieves the Elder Wand from Dumbledore’s tomb.
My Review:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 is a bleak and often joyless foray into the real (wizarding) world outside of Hogwarts Castle, our first extended trip of that nature from the film franchise. That’s mostly a function of where the characters are in J.K. Rowling’s source material. The first half to three quarters of her final book are intended to create a sense of isolation, mistrust, and despair, a tone that the film largely delivers upon. The film lacks a lot of the charm of its predecessors, but that is largely a design of the story.
That said, while the book survives upon some great and occasionally heart-wrenching character moments to remain interesting in this dark period, the film does not have much of that to fall back upon. It has to lean heavily upon visual mood instead. The film franchise spent much less time with side character like the house elf Kreacher, and Lupin, it ignored side-plots such as that of Percy Weasley, and it also largely shelved Harry’s primary love story, Ginny. As a result, the movie often felt like it was jumping from scene to scene, and moment to moment, without really landing any big emotional punches.
One exception within the film was the death of Dobby the House Elf. The moment might have landed even more impactfully if we had seen Dobby much since the second film, however, he is reintroduced early enough in this film that his sacrifice, and Harry’s grief over it, was moving. Would that moment have been better if the films had spent time with Dobby at Hogwarts? Probably. But we can’t have everything.
The other big and emotionally impactful moment in the film was Ron’s confrontation with the Horcrux locket. The ghostly Harry and Hermione images which taunted Ron were well-done. Initially, I was creeped out by the fact that they appeared to be naked, and I definitely do not remember them described that way in the book (though we only see them from the shoulders up on screen) but a naked Harry and Hermione was probably Ron’s actual worst fear. It’s just more than a little icky to confront the characters as (barely) adults when we’ve spent so much on-camera time with them as children. This ended up being an effective character scene, and one of the few such in the film, but it might have been better to dial down the realism to avoid the ick.
On that note, Deathly Hallows Part 1 contains one of the more controversial adaptation changes in the entire film franchise. After Ron leaves, Harry and Hermione have a moment in the tent, at Harry’s initiation, wherein they dance together. There are confused but strong romantic undertones throughout. Those two also have a moment, at the graveyard in Godric’s Hollow, wherein Hermione lays her head on Harry’s shoulder (not like someone who is just his friend) while he cries at his parents’ grave. The film never definitely buries the idea that Harry and Hermione have unexplored romantic interest in each other. I mean, is it realistic that a teenage boy would have a crush on a girl who looks like young Emma Watson? Sure. is it realistic that a teenage girl would have a romantic interest in the story’s “The Chosen One.” Of course. Did exploring that dynamic aid the film? I don’t think so. In fact, it undermines their respective relationships with Ron and it undercuts the impact of his return later in the movie. It undermines the romantic build-up between Ron and Hermione the film had already established (“always the tone of surprise”) and It also really erases Ginny as a character that matters to the plot (not that there was much to erase from the films.)
The film franchise has always struggled to properly balance “the golden trio” in its story-telling. Since about the third film, Ron has mostly been a side character who is mostly there for comedic relief. A lot of his bigger moments from the books have been given to Hermione on-screen. In DH Part 1, it feels like we settle on “Ron is important because Harry needs help and Hermione has to sleep sometimes.” The problem with this is that a lot of the source material really needs him to be more than that, for it to make sense.
My other issue with this film in particular is that it assumes more than a lot of the earlier films that the audience has read the book. We don’t know how they figure out what “snatchers” are, we don’t know how the Death Eaters occasionally track them down, we don’t know how the Doe Patronus finds them, we don’t have the mirrors thing explained in this film (earlier films), etc. To the credit of the film, I think it does a good job of not answering these questions. The things that happen don’t feel too Deus ex Machina. The answers are provided in a way wherein we don’t think to ask about them too much. However, more answers would have helped.
There were a couple of lowlight moments in the movie for me. The most notable was the Seven Potters chase scene. The film has Hagrid’s motorcycle on the ground in muggle traffic, causing multiple car crashes. I understand the idea that sometimes you do things in film adaptations, because they look cool, but the Harry Potter film franchise dips into that direction way too often. It’s important in any story that you care about your own in-story rules. There is a wizarding “statute of secrecy” that is deeply important, in-universe. If you ignore it, then it should matter.
On the other hand, I really enjoyed Hermione’s reading the tale of the three brothers and the animation that accompanied the story. It felt very Tim Burton-esque to me and looked fantastic. I also thought the Hermione torture scene was extremely well-acted and exceedingly hard to watch. If you separate yourself from the scene, and remember Emma Watson in the first movie, you really appreciate the leaps and bounds she had grown as an actress by the time we make it to this film. Similarly, I thought Daniel Radcliffe had a couple of really great moments of acting, but particularly at Dobby’s funeral. I don’t know what it would be like to grieve a CGI elf, but he made me believe.
My favorite happy moment in the movie, and the one that felt most like it could have happened in the books, was Ron and Harry’s back and forth about whether Hermione will ever forgive him for leaving, and Harry quipping that she’ll come around if he keeps talking about that ball of light going into his heart. It was funny, realistic, and really rebuilt the Harry and Ron friendship for the audience.
As usual, the cinematography was excellent. The fact they were camping for much of the film created a lot of really great opportunities for beautiful landscape shots, and the film delivered. I also really loved the set design and look of Godric’s Hollow.
The film score felt really empty for me. I think that was by design. The story was increasingly heavy and isolated. We barely see anyone but the Big 3. We never visit the castle. The film score added to that weight by not using the music to lift any of that burden from its audience. Occasionally silence and absence are the appropriate artistic choice and that happened here. As a result, we should expect Part 2 to be almost the opposite in terms of the score as hope presumably returns and the good guys start to overcome the bad guys. Unfortunately for DH Part 1, as a standalone movie, the plot mostly goes in Voldemort’s favor. There’s just not much room for hope. It even ends with him getting the Elder Wand.
On the whole, there’s a lot of good in Deathly Hallows Part 1. Most of the bad is just due to a lack of time to develop side characters throughout the films and a rushed pace – though given the context of the story that still sort of works to help set the mood. The film could have done a better job building up the stakes, regarding the Elder Wand and what it means that Voldemort has it, however, there’s time and room for some of that to happen in Part 2. This is the first movie in the franchise where the adult cast is almost entirely on the sidelines and the three young actors were definitely up to the task of carrying the film, and I thought they all did a great job. This is not an enjoyable movie to watch, but it does its job. I’m looking forward to seeing how it all concludes.
Have you seen Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1? if so, what did you think?
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