Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

I have long been a fan of the Harry Potter series, both the books and the movies in their own rights.  I waited with barely-contained excitement for the final film, The Deathly Hallows Part 2, and last night we went to the midnight premier.  As a movie it succeeded in bringing the story to a close in a masterful cinematic spectacle, but as a fan of the books, I was extremely disappointed.

First, let me say that I liked the movie.  It was well-done, it was entertaining, it succeeded both in terms of story-telling and entertainment.  But there are key ways in which it deviates from the canon of Rowling's Harry Potter stories that are, like the Arvada Kadavra curse itself, unforgivable.  So this review is written from the point of view of a devoted fan.  The movie is getting almost universal accolades, and since I had such a strong negative reaction to it, I have to get my thoughts out both to work through them, and hopefully to hear from others to see if I'm alone in my letdown.


Caution: spoilers ahead.  If you haven't seen the movie yet and you don't want to either have details revealed to you, or your appreciation of these details impaired by what I have to say about them, then stop here.

I'm not such a purist that I require every detail from the books be included, or everything that is included to be merely a faithful cinematic presentation of the book.  Movies and books are different media, and I understand that you can't have everything.  You can't include every detail and you can't tell the story in the same way.  I'm actually okay with this.  But when you change the story in ways that don't make sense; that undercut the explanations for why the story moves this way or that way, or change the motivations of characters; that's when you start to lose me.

We already knew that we were deviating from the story in critical ways at the end of Deathly Hallows 1 (DH1).  In the book, Harry ponders whether to interrogate Griphook or Ollivander first, and the decision represents the culmination of his uncertainty of whether to pursue Hallows or Horcruxes (which had never been adequately developed in DH1).  But the tension of the moment is heightened because while Harry is struggling with this decision, Voldemort is getting closer to the Elder Wand; if Harry is to choose Hallows, then he has to act quickly to get to the wand first.  In deciding to stick with Dumbledore's plan of finding and extinguishing Horcruxes, Harry is also conceding possession of the Elder Wand to Voldemort, meaning that when he faces Voldemort, the dark wizard will be in possession of the unbeatable wand.  But in the movie, Voldemort already has the Elder Wand; he took it from Dumbledore's grave at the end of DH1; the significance of the decision is lost.  DH2 had no way to recover this tension or the weight of this decision.

I loved the scene at Gringotts, even though it deviated from the book in minor details (no Travers, no Flagrante curse, and a clumsy glossing over Bellatrix's wand).  However, the story moved forward successfully from here, and you couldn't help but feel sympathetic to the poor, abused dragon flexing his wings for the first time in, probably, centuries.

The next moment of disappointment occurred at the Hog's Head, when Harry finally meets Aberforth, Albus' brother.  We get introduced to their sister Ariana, who Aberforth is still mourning, but instead of learning about the history of Dumbledore's interest in the Elder Wand, the conflict with the evil wizard Grindelwald (who had been teased in DH1) and the quest for the Hallows, and the tragedy that resulted in Ariana's death, Harry just says "I don't care about your past" and we skip that whole, revealing diversion.  Why is this important?  Harry does care about Dumbledore's past (in DH1, Auntie Muriel at the wedding intones, "My dear boy, are you sure you knew him at all?", wounding Harry with the realization that he knows so little about Dumbledore).  This gives depth to the Dumbledore character: he is not the perfect, white wizard that many idolize, but a man with a weakness, who can never be the true master of the Hallows.  But more importantly, Harry concludes that sometimes you have to make personal sacrifices for the "greater good," even though he didn't fully realize at that moment what that meant for him in his near future.  This sets Harry up to be the true master of the Hallows and to accept the impossible decision he has to make.  Without learning about Dumbledore's past, we are less able to understand Harry's future.

There are various deviations from the story after this that aren't critical, such as skipping the trip to the Ravenclaw common room and the encounter with Alecto Carrow in which she summons Voldemort to the castle, or the return of characters like Hagrid to Hogwarts.  While they were missed, it didn't really hurt the story.

Once Harry realizes that he has to die, that Voldemort has to kill him, and that the time has come, Harry is utterly alone.  In the book he dons the invisibility cloak and solemnly makes his way, amidst the ruined Hogwarts, towards the Forbidden Forest.  He only takes a moment to speak to Neville, to tell Neville to kill the snake; he sees Ginny, but won't reveal himself to her in fear of losing his courage.  He then heads to the forest under the cloak, gets reunited with his dead loved ones via the resurrection stone in the forest, and walks with them to the clearing where he must face Voldemort.  However, in the movie there are several key differences.  He says a teary farewell to Ron and Hermione.  This seems to reduce the magnitude of Harry's solitude in this moment, detracting from the monumental weight of his death march to the forest.  He does not walk to the forest under the cloak, and he never has this conversation with Neville.  So later, when Neville is hunting Nagini, there's no real reason for him to be doing so; he's fulfilling a critical purpose with no meaning.

The conversation with Dumbledore in King's Cross is woefully short, leaving out many key details about the connection between Harry and Voldemort.  Harry uses this knowledge in his final battle to come with Voldemort; but in the movie, none of this detail is provided.  I wonder if they'll include a longer scene in the extended DVD?

Finally, the most serious problem that I have with the movie is the conclusion between Harry and Voldemort, after Voldemort has unknowingly destroyed the Horcrux inside of Harry.  First, in the book, Neville kills Nagini, the final Horcrux, while everyone still thinks that Harry is dead.  Neville is able to do this because Voldemort, thinking that he had won the day, releases Nagini from his magical protection.   

But in the movie Voldemort never protects Nagini in this way.  The way that Voldemort treats Nagini provides an important clue to the audience about Voldemort's state of mind: when he is most fearful for his survival, Voldemort carefully protects the last Horcrux, but when Harry is defeated he lowers his guard.  This magical protection is also the cue for Snape to reveal the truth to Harry in his dying moments: Dumbledore's plan has been fulfilled; all but the last Horcrux have been destroyed, and Voldemort is at his most vulnerable moment.  But without the magical protection of Nagini and the end to that protection, the story becomes confused.  When Neville, with the Sword of Gryffindor in hand, is confronting Voldemort and Nagini, Harry chooses this moment to reveal that he is still alive, before Nagini has been killed.  At this point Voldemort could easily have resumed the magical protection around Nagini and our heroes would have had no way to defeat Voldemort.  The sequence of events as presented in the movie simply make no sense.

In the book we learn that Harry's sacrifice, the fact that he allowed himself to be killed by Voldemort as a shield based upon the love for his friends and Hogwarts, imbued Hogwarts with the same protection that Lilly Potter had provided Harry when she made a similar sacrifice for him.  This is beautiful symmetry that explains Voldemort's inability to further cause serious harm to his enemies, and in many ways is the core message of Harry Potter, from the beginning to the end.  Inconceivably, this is completely absent from the movie.

I have read that many people felt the final duel between Harry and Voldemort as told in the book, in the Great Hall at Hogwarts, was lacking.  On the contrary, I found this conclusion in the book to be extremely satisfying, for a couple of reasons.  It was important for the final battle to be fought in front of the surviving wizards and students, both so they could hear the conversation and see Harry's bravery.  It was important for Harry to offer Tom Riddle the opportunity for remorse.  We had to learn about the uncertainty of the allegiance of the Elder Wand, and that Snape had been loyal to Dumbledore to the end.  We know that the cause of Tom Riddle's death was his own Killing Curse, as it rebounded off of Harry's successful expelliarmus. And we had to see Riddle's dead body cast aside and neglected, not treated with any respect or concern. 

We get none of this in the movie.  The duel is fought alone, with no witnesses.  Before the final curses are cast, we don't learn about the uncertainty of the allegiance of the Elder Wand.  We don't know what causes Voldemort to die, just that, as Harry disarms him, he evaporates into ashes.  Harry never offers Voldemort a chance for remorse.  The entire ending of the movie simply feels lost after this point; nobody saw what happened and nobody seems curious at all.  I was left wondering if people knew that Voldemort was even dead.

And the final disappointment for me was the missing scene in the headmaster's office, and the conversation with Dumbledore's portrait about the disposition of the Deathly Hallows.  In the book Harry uses the Elder Wand to repair his broken wand, and then they agree to return the wand to Dumbledore's grave.  In the movie, though, Harry just snaps the Elder Wand in two, and he never gets his own wand back.  This is severely disappointing, after so much had been built up over the relationship between wizards and their wands.  There was no reason for this omission other than expedience, but after the incoherence of the final battle between Harry and Voldemort it left me feeling, on Harry's behalf, betrayed.  All that he had been through, and he didn't even get his wand back! 

That's it.  The movies are finished; whatever imperfections they contain, they will contain forever.   I can certainly hope that some of these shortcomings are addressed in the DVD, or at least explained in the commentary.  I suspect I will have to continue to hear people talk about what a fantastic conclusion this movie is to the series, and in many ways they're right.  But to those of us who put in the time to learn about wands and wizards, to understand and sympathize with Harry and the tragic sacrifice he must make, as well as the journey he has to undertake in order to mature into the young man who was capable of the tragic sacrifice, the deviations from the original story were disappointing and disjointed.  If you had to divide Harry Potter fans into two groups, those who prefer the books and those who prefer the movies, I would now have to be squarely on the book side.  Which is a shame, because up until this final movie I felt they were equally good, different in understandable and workable ways, and satisfying in their own rights.  Sadly, not any more.