Review - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
The Film Adaptation of J.K. Rowling's Sixth Book is Finally Here
Jul 15, 2009
Heaven help you if you’ve not read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince before you go to see the long-delayed Warner Bros. adaptation. In fact, you’re probably in trouble if you haven’t read the preceding five books a couple of times, too; there are just too many blanks to fill in, even with a running time of two hours and 30 minutes.
HP6: The Plot from Book to Screen
Book Six was always going to be the hardest of J.K. Rowling’s to adapt to the screen. His sixth year finds Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) taking private lessons with Headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), where he learns the back-story of his arch-nemesis Voldemort which he hopes will give him the tools to survive and defeat the Dark Lord. Harry spends much of the book as a passive spectator, diving in and out of magical memories when he isn’t obsessing over nefarious fellow-student Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton).
Director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves wisely chose to cut down the flashbacks, but filled the void with unnecessary set-pieces (if ever there was a time to ignore Quidditch, this is it), an attack that doesn’t occur in the book, and a lot of teenaged canoodling. The burgeoning relationship between Harry’s mates Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) has been fairly well-established by the previous films, but Harry’s newfound interest in Ron’s sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright) may come as a surprise to filmgoers who’d forgotten she existed.
Behind the Camera: David Yates and Steve Kloves
Kloves, an otherwise talented screenwriter, has been one of the weakest links in the Potter franchise. He took a break for film number five, and the rest seems to have rejuvenated him: although he still quotes Rowling’s worst expository dialogue verbatim and is no doubt responsible for the above-mentioned set-pieces, he has stopped his four-film-long character assassination of Ron and mercifully taken some of the focus off Hermione. This gives Grint more to do than just mug for the camera, and keeps Watson from having to do too much. (Although her acting has also improved, Watson was always the weakest of the three main kids.)
Yates, working with Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, doesn’t quite achieve the flow that, say, Alfonso Cuaron did with the third film, but his shot compositions are almost always interesting, and the two have developed a colour palette that matches the serious tone of the story as well as giving a real feeling of impending doom. And a cute visual joke appears in Harry and Dumbledore’s final “lesson”: in a sequence that, more than any other, was an homage by Rowling to Tolkien, Harry is attacked by what looks like a horde of wet Gollums.
However, the climax, which ought to be a punch to the gut, is over too quickly and isn’t given enough emotional weight, particularly given the identity of the Half-Blood Prince and how Harry is supposed to feel about that revelation. And so much is left out of the story that one wonders how the final films (Book Seven is being split into two) will make any sense at all, or have enough material for two movies. When the first Harry Potter film came out, a lot of people fretted that it was a mistake to adapt for the screen a book that was so joyously read by a whole generation of children. “Mistake” might be too strong a word, but turns out those worriers were right – read the books instead, kids.
