rDV7kyzWPor2jdoulS0RAEkKo1_500[1]Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Rating:  4/5

We did get out over the weekend to see the newest Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  Ultimately I found it to be a very good movie, well worth seeing, but one that was in the end merely evocative of the book rather than a true, faithful adaptation of the book.

The movie starts with Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, Harry’s guardian and mentor, arriving to take Harry with him on a trip to recruit a new professor, Horace Slughorn, after which he’s dumped off near the Weasley home prior to heading off to Hogwarts.

Harry Potter’s sixth year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry starts painfully, as his attempts to figure out what the secretive Draco Malfoy is up to lead to him getting roughed up fairly badly, even before he gets off the Hogwarts Express.  From there, we’re whirled into the events of the book, with Harry discovering an old Potions textbook heavily annotated with spells and advice from someone enigmatically referring to him- or herself as “The Half-Blood Prince”.

The students plot and scheme with almost equal fervor to both unravel the plans of the Dark Lord Voldemort, and to pair up romantically.  Romances are shuffled and tested as Harry struggles to obtain a very vital memory from Professor Slughorn, a memory he is loathe to part with.

All the standard elements of the Harry Potter movies are here — a Quidditch match, classroom scenes, Professor Snape showing outrageous favoritism to his chosen Slytherin students, Hagrid waxing sentimental over some hideous magical creature only it’s mother (and Hagrid) could ever love, and some magical duelling.

I was disappointed both in scenes left out (anything having to do with Dumbledore’s Army, along with all but two of the Pensieve memories and the funeral at the end) and the new scenes tacked on (the assault on the Weasley home being the worst).  We didn’t see much of anyone but the main three characters, and many of the professors may as well not have been in the movie at all for the minimal screen time they got.

The acting was very good — Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson have matured into excellent actors, and although Rupert Grint’s performances are a bit too slapstick for me, he does have a gift for comedy and reliably gets me to laugh at the appropriate times.  Jim Broadbent as Horace Slughorn stole the show as far as I’m concerned, except when Helena Bonham Carter was chewing scenery as Bellatrix Lestrange.

In the end, though, although I think the movie has many, many strong points and is overall very faithful to the spirit of the novel, I don’t think it stands on its own as an adaptation, as some of the earlier movies did and as the Lord of the Rings movies did.  At best, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a great vehicle for reminiscence, each scene reminding you of the fuller, more complete events from the book, but forcing you to supply the extra details to knit everything together in your own head.

I’ve talked to a few people who have not read the book but have seen the movie, and their reaction has generally been confusion.  There’s just too much going on in Half-Blood Prince for it all to make it cleanly into a 2-1/2 hour movie.  Thank goodness Deathly Hallows is going to be split into two installments.