The English Geek

Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince: A Movie Review, with Spoilers

In an article in the NY Times,

Warner Brothers (the studio that released the Harry Potter movies) is quoted as saying "One of our main objectives in bringing the Harry Potter films to the screen has been to remain as faithful to their original source material as created by J. K Rowling." The article itself is about all the drinking that happens in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which is a different topic for another post, but when I read it I had to stifle a chuckle.

Or maybe it was a gasp of annoyance.

Whatever. After seeing the movie last week, I'm not sure that anyone at Warner Brothers, especially the writers, has actually read any of the books. Maybe none of them are aware that the seventh and final book has been written and published and that they could, you know, read it too? I'm not sure. What I do know is that I had severely mixed feelings about the movie when I left the theater.

In a way, I loved it. I loved seeing Howarts again: the magic, the castle, the characters. I liked the development of Harry and Ginny's relationship, as well as Hermione's and Ron's. I liked that it had a more romantic sort of feel, since that is authentic with the age of the characters. I loved the scene in the underground lake, when Harry and Dumbledore try to get one of Voldemort's horcruxes. I enjoyed watching Malfoy's character and seeing him change from a stock adolescent-bully character to someone more three-dimensional. In fact, I could nearly agree with this excellent reviewthat Janssen told me about.

Except for one thing: they left too many important things out. I was thoroughly annoyed, for example, that Snape just throws out his "I am the half-blood prince" explanation before sprinting off into the darkness; how does he even know that Harry had his old potions book? The other review I read was exactly right; there wasn't enough development of the relationship between Harry and Dumbledore. This matters because at the end of the movie, when Dumbledore dies, it doesn't feel like the tremendous loss to Harry that it did in the books. But it also matters because there are enormous, gaping, huge holes left in the plot that I can't imagine how they'll fill when the Deathly Hallows movies are released. Ginny hides Harry's potion book, for example, in the room of requirement, not Harry, so he doesn't ever see the abandoned tiara that is actually one of the horcruxes. You don't ever see the ring with the broken stone that also has a huge importance in the next part of the story. The memory that Harry sees in the pensieve, explaining Voldemort's origins? Not in the movie, although his genealogy matters in The Deathly Hallows.

I keep going back to my original theory: the Harry Potter people are afraid of the Twilight people. That fear made the movie into something more teen-angsty than it really needed to be, and forced it to lose focus on the important parts of the story. Plus, while the writers don't seem to have read the books, but it's as if they're counting on the fact that you have read them. The plot holes can be filled in by you, the movie-goer, if you've read the books. That, to me, is the biggest failure of any movie that started out as a book. Of course the movie is an adaption of the book, and it is never going to exactly match the story each person read, because we all have so many different associations with words that affect how we imagine things. (The inside of Hagrid's cabin, for example, is, in my head, laid out exactly like my grandparents' apartment was, although with far more rustic accouterments.) I have come to understand that the movie interpretation is always something nearly entirely different than the book was, because it is a different medium with different rules and boundaries. But to leave such glaring gaps in the story is an entirely different thing. The setting, the casting, the character development: all of that was great. But the plot itself? If you hadn't read the books I don't know how it would have made any sense.

A few minutes after the movie ended, Kendell called to ask me if the movie had been good or not. I was initially enthusiastic. "I loved it!" I told him. But even in the post-coital-ish "I loved it!" reaction, I had a hesitation. I think I loved it not so much for the way the movie succeeded at telling a story, but because I loved being back in Harry Potter's world. That sense of being transported somewhere else is pleasant, to say the least. But that speaks more to the power of world-building than it does to how "good" the movie was. The more I think about it, the more disappointed I get.

But that's just my opinion. What's yours?

Prince Caspian: A Movie Review (of Sorts)

Out of all the books I read growing up, there are a few that remain strong in my memory; little snippets of images from them will simply pop into my brain once in awhile. Anne of Green Gables (I still would like to taste cherry cordial), Little House on the Prairie(I think of the pig-bladder balloon every time I buy regular, non-icky balloons), Noel Streatfeild's Shoesbooks (sarsaparilla, anyone?), Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quartet (how strange that I grew up to marry an IT man): all of these are still jingling around in my head, affecting my psyche, but none with more impact that C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. They're among the earliest books I remember reading, and I must have re-read them at least ten times. When I found out I was pregnant with Haley, one of the first things I did was buy the entire Narnia set and read it immediately, on the somewhat far-flung idea that what I was putting into my brain would affect her developing brain. I still have that set; Haley's read it twice and Jake is working his way through it right now.

So I guess it's putting it mildly to say that I'm a fan of C. S. Lewis. (Even his grown-up stuff, too, but that's a different post.) And, for me, seeing the movie wasn't so much about the story itself, or even (as in The Lord of The Rings) wanting to see the film version be as close to the book version as possible. Instead, it felt like a little reconnection to the bookish, shy child I used to be. I even made sure to reread Prince Caspian before we went to see it last Saturday, and I realized immediately that there would have to be more drama added. In the book, the battle is fairly mild, and Aslan's around almost all the time, and there is a lot of character development, none of which might add to that cinematic drama. So I expected much fiercer battle scenes in the movie, and a twisting of the plot, which is exactly what was delivered.

I think the film does a lot of things right. The scenery is absolutely gorgeous (I want to know where it was filmed so I can travel there!); the ruins of Cair Paravel and of Aslan's How spot on. Prince Caspian is perfectly cast, as are the rest of the Telmarines, and the Pevensies seem more believable as heroes than they did in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. I especially loved Edmund in this movie, the sort of hidden affection he shows for Peter. The attempt at Dark Magic, to bring back the White Witch, was even better than in the book. And although Kendell kept laughing at the impossibility of the fighting mice, I was thrilled (in a very child-like way) to see Reepicheep on the big screen. The centaurs were wonderfully fey---wild and fierce and wise---and the griffins an unexpected inclusion. And the twists they added to the plot (namely the battle at the castle of Miraz) added the expected extra drama.

What I think the filmmakers forgot, though, is that while Lewis's fantasy can be enjoyed by adults (really: even if you're, say, 57, and haven't ever read Narnia, you could read them tomorrow and get more out of them than just a simple, fluffy fantasy), it was written for children. It is, in my mind, a story about children becoming adults but still holding onto the spark of their childhood. Take Prince Caspian. What was left out of the movie is that he believedin the old creatures of Narnia (his professor taught him about them), and when he found them in the woods he was seeing bits of longed-for fairy tales come to life. He becomes a man in the landscape of his childhood's imagination. Peter and Susan, too, who don't get to come back to Narnia, leave their childhoods in this world that nurtured them. The film almost succeeds in portraying this for Peter and Susan, but it fails with Prince Caspian.

Lucy, too, has her moment of knowledge. In the book, this happens earlier, and I think I like the placement in the movie---near the end---even better, because it really is the soul of Prince Caspian; the guts, really, of the entire Narniaseries. It is one of the images that pop into my head every once in awhile. While they are traveling to meet up with Caspian, Lucy sees a flash of Aslan, leading them in an unexpected way. She tells the others, but no one believes her, so she reluctantly follows the group. This decision leads them far out of the way, resulting in more losses on the battlefield. When Lucy finally meets up with Aslan, she tells him she wanted to follow him, only the others were being so difficult. He simply looks at her, and she knows: she should have followed him anyway. She should have had faith enough to believe. (Aslan is, after all, the Christ figure.) When she realizes that her decision to not have enough faith resulted in more deaths than necessary, she is (of course) devastated. "What would have happened" she asks, "if I had followed you?"

"We can never know that," Aslan tells her. Lucy learns, in that moment, the way that faith works, how we sometimes have to follow a path that seems to make no sense at all, trusting that our sight isn't always perfect. This is the main theme of the book, the idea that turns it from fluff to something substantial. The movie almost manages to convey it, and so is almostsubstantial. Still, despite all my hesitations, I left the movie feeling like my childhood self had received something extraordinary. The much-loved story brought to life is nearly as good as what that version of myself really always wanted: to escape the lonely little confines of her world and be in Narnia along with Lucy and Prince Caspian and everyone else.