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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)

Dusty

This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:

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This film is based on J. K. Rowling’s 2007 novel of the same name. Both are the final 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, Alan Rickman, Michael Gambon, Ralph Fiennes
Release Date: July 15, 2011 (United States)
Run time: 2 hours, 10 minutes

THE PLOT:

via wiki:

After burying Dobby, Harry Potter asks the goblin Griphook to help him, along with Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, break into Bellatrix Lestrange‘s vault at Gringotts bank, suspecting a Horcrux is there. Griphook agrees, in exchange for the Sword of Gryffindor. Wandmaker Ollivander tells Harry that two wands taken from Malfoy Manor belonged to Bellatrix and Draco Malfoy; he senses Draco’s wand has changed its allegiance to Harry, who captured it from Draco. A horcrux, Helga Hufflepuff‘s cup, is found in Bellatrix’s vault, but Griphook snatches the sword and abandons them. Trapped by security, they release the dragon guardian and flee Gringotts on its back. Harry has a vision of Lord Voldemort at Gringotts, furious at the theft. Harry also realises a Horcrux connected to Rowena Ravenclaw is hidden at Hogwarts. The trio apparate into Hogsmeade and are helped by Aberforth Dumbledore. It is revealed that he was the one who sent Dobby to Malfoy Manor. He then reveals a secret passageway into Hogwarts, which Neville Longbottom guides them through.

Severus Snape knows Harry has returned and threatens to punish any staff or students who aid Harry. Harry confronts Snape, who flees during a duel with Professor McGonagall. McGonagall rouses the Hogwarts community for battle. Luna Lovegood urges Harry to speak to Helena Ravenclaw‘s ghost. Helena reveals Voldemort performed “dark magic” on her mother’s diadem and tells Harry that the diadem is somewhere in the Room of Requirement. In the Chamber of Secrets, Ron and Hermione destroy the Horcrux cup with a Basilisk fang. Draco, Blaise Zabini and Gregory Goyle attack Harry in the Room of Requirement, but Ron and Hermione intervene. Goyle casts an uncontrollable Fiendfyre curse that kills him while Harry, Ron, and Hermione save Malfoy and Zabini and escape on brooms. Once outside, Harry stabs the diadem with the Basilisk fang, and Ron kicks it into the inferno. As Voldemort’s army attacks, Harry, seeing into Voldemort’s mind, realises that Voldemort’s snake Nagini is the final Horcrux. In the boathouse, the trio overhear Voldemort telling Snape that the Elder Wand cannot serve Voldemort until Snape dies; Nagini then viciously attacks Snape. As Snape dies, he gives Harry one of his memories. Meanwhile, Fred Weasley, Remus Lupin, and Nymphadora Tonks are killed in the chaos at Hogwarts.

Harry views Snape’s memory in the Pensieve: Snape despised Harry’s late father James, who bullied him, but he loved Harry’s mother Lily. Following her death, Snape worked with Albus Dumbledore as a double agent amongst the Death Eaters, to protect Harry from Voldemort. Harry also learns that Dumbledore was dying and planned for Snape to kill him. It was Snape who conjured the Patronus doe that led Harry to Gryffindor’s sword. Harry also learns that he became an Horcrux by accident when Voldemort’s curse originally failed to kill him; Voldemort must now kill Harry to destroy the soul shard within him. Using the Resurrection Stone that had been stored in the Golden Snitch bequeathed to him, Harry summons the spirits of his parents, Sirius Black, and Remus. They comfort him before he surrenders to Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest. Voldemort casts the Killing Curse upon Harry, who awakens in limbo. Dumbledore’s spirit meets him and explains that Harry is now free of Voldemort, and can choose to return to his body or move on. Harry chooses the former.

Voldemort displays Harry’s apparent corpse and demands that Hogwarts surrender. As Neville draws the Sword of Gryffindor from the Sorting Hat in defiance, Harry reveals he is alive, and the Malfoys abandon Voldemort. While Harry confronts Voldemort in a duel throughout the castle, Ron’s mother, Molly, kills Bellatrix in the Great Hall and Neville decapitates Nagini, destroying the last of the horcruxes. Harry finally kills Voldemort after his Expelliarmus charm deflects Voldemort’s Killing Curse, rebounding it onto the Dark Lord. After the battle, Harry explains to Ron and Hermione that Voldemort never commanded the Elder Wand. It recognised him as its true master after he had disarmed Draco, who had earlier disarmed its previous owner, Dumbledore, atop the Astronomy Tower. Instead of claiming the Elder Wand, Harry destroys it.

Nineteen years later, Harry and his friends proudly watch their children leave for Hogwarts at King’s Cross station.

My Review:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is a great saga-completing movie that ends a story that began on Halloween in 1981. For movie audiences, it ended an eleven year run of films that allowed us to watch a cast of young precocious kids grow up and become talented adult actors. This movie gave us many of their best performances. The screenplay hit the right adaptation notes – including a few changes that felt like an improvement on the source material. In a franchise that has excelled in visual effects and cinematography, this was their best work. The movie was not perfect, but it was close enough to that mark that it made the weaker earlier films worthwhile because they eventually arrived here.

From the first moment of the film, until it end, the musical score that felt so empty for large stretches of Part 1 was unbelievably good – rich, sad, pensive, and triumphant. Alexandre Desplat scored the film, using many of the themes originally composed by John Williams for the first three volumes of the franchise, and then adding his own. His work was nominated for an Academy Award and it more than deserved the nomination.

In a movie like this, you sort of hope to have beloved characters get a moment in the sun, as something of a sendoff. Part 2 did not disappoint. There are too many to go over, one by one, so I’ll just focus on a few several. The late Maggie Smith’s Professor McGonagall was DELIGHTFUL early in this movie, fighting off Professor Snape and getting the castle ready for war, and gleefully talking about always wanting to use a certain spell. Her stern, fierce, and warm-hearted characterization of the Transfiguration Professor was perfect.

The writers finally remembered to give Rupert Grint’s Ron some good moments, too, winning over Hermione romantically, showing big brains to get into the Chamber of Secrets, and then surprising her again by finding Harry in the Room of Requirement when she was unsure of herself. Most of his big moments were source material things, but he managed to hang onto them in the adaptation, for once, and It was long overdue. Rupert did a great job.

Evanna Lynch (Luna – my favorite character) got her big moment to shine, figuring out for Harry that he needed to talk to a ghost to find the diadem, in addition to just generally bringing sunshine to a tonally dark story. It was an adaptation change to have Luna take Harry to Helena Ravenclaw, but the change worked. I liked it better than the source material, actually. Lynch’s Luna doesn’t get many opportunities to do anything other than be dreamy, but she NAILED the scene where she yells at Harry to make him listen to her.

Matthew Lewis’s Neville – as was the case with the book Neville – was almost unrecognizably different from our introduction to him in the first film. It’s a crazy thing to play a side character for seven movies, as a child, and then be asked to be the co-hero of the finale. He more than made it work. Neville killing Nagini is one of the most memorable moments in film history, and permanently etched on the minds of the story’s original young audience. You could see glimpses of the original Neville n there, but he was grown.

Alan Rickman was brilliant. He had probably the most difficult role in the series. He had to convey things, and emote things, with quiet sneering comments and blank expressions for most of this franchise. Here he has to let Snape reveal the big secret and it needs to fit with the prior work he’s done as the character. It does. Rickman was so good in this role that his version of it was made more heroic than the source material had him be. It’s almost impossible to imagine someone else wearing the ludicrously bat-like wardrobe and being taken seriously and feeling real.

The last of the great performances that I’ll mention is Daniel Radcliffe. He had to do a lot of heavy emotional lifting in this movie and he was up for the challenge. His version of Harry is more stoic take on him than the one we see from the books, but he did it well and it was consistent. His best moment, in my opinion, was the scene just before he goes into the forest. He looked like someone about to walk to his own death after being betrayed. He also looked like someone being strong for his friends. I always like acting done mostly without talking, and he achieves that in that scene.

The Harry Potter franchise has always looked good in a way that stands the test of time. The visual effects continue to work, despite their age. The cinematography, sets, and costuming are all done well. Part 2 is probably the best film in the franchise from a visuals standpoint. The mood-setting foggy scenes to start the film were excellent, but so were the extended battle scenes at the school. My favorite visual effect was the magical dome that was placed over the school. It looked big in scale and like… magic. What more could one ask for? If I have a second favorite visual scene in the movie, it was the dragon bursting into the bank lobby of Gringotts. Fantastic moment. Quirrell trying to rob an empty vault made the news in the first movie. Successfully robbing a vault and escaping on a dragon is the stuff of legends and it’s not even going to make the front page of the next edition of The Daily Prophet.

While I loved a vast majority of this movie, I did have some complaints. The scene wherein Harry says goodbye to Ron and Hermione is some of Daniel Radcliffe’s best acting. However, almost everything else about that scene is irritating. They go to an immense amount of effort and acquire the biggest plot twist in the entire series – in the form of Snape’s dying memories. After seeing them, Harry tells Hermione that he thinks she already knew about the “Harry the Horcrux” situation, and she more or less confirms it. You undercut what Harry just went through and the value of Snape’s death when you imply that it might have been possible to get the information by having Hermione just be her usual clever self instead. Then after, when both Hermione and Ron believe Harry is leaving to go die, Ron doesn’t even hug his best friend? He just stands there and blankly watches him leave? (Of course, in the films, Hermione is probably Harry’s actual best friend, and Ron is a pretty good friend who is always around and who kind of harbors on-going grudges and jealousies of Harry that occasionally boil over.)

I did not like Voldemort’s portrayal. He just felt too weak and too lacking in menace. It’s hard to really feel afraid of a guy who is constantly getting beaten by high school kids. It would have helped the characterization to have him look more book accurate – with a more skull-ish head and red glowing eyes. The sight of him should be a horror in and of itself.

The movie Voldemort just feels like an overpowered noseless insecure bully who is finally brought down. There isn’t enough menace or gravity – and that might also be a source material issue, at least in part. I would have preferred his death reflect a failure to escape mortality, too. In the book, he falls to the floor with a mundane finality. They even deal with his body after he’s gone. Here he disintegrates like he was on the wrong end of the Thanos snap. It’s completely unclear as to why that happened and the choice felt like it ran counter to the direction of his plot arc. He wanted to be more than human and failed. Dying by disintegrating makes it look like he *was* more than human.

Those things aside, I really enjoyed the movie. Deathly Hallows Part 2 was a great story, with excellent acting, an outstanding musical score, and fantastic special effects. If this had not been good, I think the franchise would be remembered quite differently today. Several of its predecessor movies were okay, but not great. Sticking the landing here elevated everything that came before it. As Deathly Hallows Part 2 was excellent, the entire film franchise is considered, collectively, a modern classic.

Other Franchise Reviews:

For anyone interested, I included below the notes I took while watching.

Notes:

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