Chris Holmes Online

Seeing a book come to life on the silver screen can be a blessing or a curse. The blessing comes when we’re rewarded with a faithful adaptation that manages to reach beyond our own imagination; putting visuals on the screen that leave us in awe; telling the story we’re familiar with in a way that still manages to capture the drama and suspense of the written form. Peter Jackson managed it with The Lord of the Rings trilogy: we cry when Gandalf falls, even though, as readers of the book, we know it’s coming. The flight from the Balrog down the great steps and across the bridge of Khazad Dum is a perfectly executed scene that contains an immense buildup of drama and ends in a painful and heartfelt climax.

The curse is when we’re not rewarded with a faithful adaptation; when the source material isn’t taken seriously; when we’re presented with a story that is not as visually stunning as the one conjured in our mind; when important details are left out of the story and it leaves us feeling cheated and unfulfilled; when scenes that played out dramatically in written form are left to die on the screen, devoid of any real drama or emotion.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a strange mix of blessing and curse; it is a film that looks good and sounds good – it is polished in every way we’ve come to expect – and we think it should be good, but ultimately it falls short of greatness by a very long way. And it is only after we – the readers of the book – have had time to sit back and really digest the film do we realize just how much we’ve been cheated; just how must went missing.

Director David Yates and his special effects crew do a wonderful job of putting us squarely in the Harry Potter universe; we are greeted with all the familiar characters and locations and enough cameo performances to remind us just how big the tale is that we’re following through these six films. But he also manages to delete just about every important detail from this particular story, which leaves the whole thing feeling sterile and (to non-readers of the book) unnecessarily confusing.

I complained about this problem in my Order of the Phoenix review:

While the director David Yates and screenwriter Michael Goldenberg wisely trim the film of many of the side stories and sub plots from the book, it could have used another twenty or thirty minutes of development for the main story. Having read the book prior to seeing the movie, I noticed several scenes in the film that were exceptionally brief almost to the point of being unclear. Some viewers are going to feel like they’re missing out on a larger story (and they are).

Apparently, Yates didn’t learn his lesson with Order of the Phoenix. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is even more condensed than its predecessor; crucial information that pertains to the main story arc is simply not even presented to the viewer. And it’s a shame, really. Because Half-Blood Prince is easily one of the best Potter books and should have been one of the best films.

Readers of the book will recognize a vast array of missing and incomplete story elements: Harry’s infatuation with the Half-Blood Prince’s potions book that borders on hero-worship; how Harry comes to learn of the qualities of the Beazor that ultimately saves Ron’s life; Harry learning about the origins of the Inferi; Hermoine’s never ending attempts to decipher exactly what “Half-Blood Prince” means and discover the identity of the previous owner of the potions book; the seriousness of Dumbledor’s hand injury; how Dumbledor injured his hand; Dumbledor attempting to figure out how to remove the locket from the water basin… All important elements of the story in the book, and all missing from the film.

And yet, like its predecessor, Order of the Phoenix, so many of these missing or incomplete story elements could have been easily handled with some very simple and effective scenes. An additional 20 minutes of film could have done wonders. I wanted so badly, for instance, to listen as Dumbledor explained the concept of the Inferi to Harry, but that teaching moment never came. I waited patiently with excitement to see Dumbledor riddle-out the answer to the locket and the water basin, but instead the answer pops out of Dumbledor’s mouth about as brutally as it must have landed on the script page.

And then there is the real crime of the film: the ending. The moment of the film when it should have been built up and set upon the audience with the grandest of climaxes, it instead is treated with irreverence. The final crucial scenes had no impact and no weight.

As a grown man reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I wept when I set upon the dramatic ending. I was surprised, completely unprepared for what happened, and utterly saddened. I re-read the ending more than once because of the sheer weight of the drama; it was powerful and heartfelt and it hammered me emotionally. Everything about those final pages was perfect – the build-up, the execution, the final moments. It was all perfectly done, perfectly written by author J.K. Rowling. All David Yates had to do was put it on the screen.

And he didn’t even come close.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince should have been the best film of the series so far. It could have been – with a few more key moments sprinkled in and an ending that would have stayed faithful to the book, it would have been.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.