On Friday night, I went to see the new Harry Potter movie because that's what I do on Friday nights in Wichita. And even though the critics loved it, I've gotta admit I was kinda disappointed. I think a big part of that is just the difficulty of translating a book to the screen, but, to be perfectly honest, the last book didn't exactly have a vivid description of the last battle (which took up a good half of the movie). That should have given the director more or less a blank slate to do what he wanted with it. But instead of being epic, the whole thing felt pretty small-time. I think it's inevitable to compare these movies to the Lord of the Rings movies-- both are epic fantasy series' that end with big, bloody battles. But, compared to Peter Jackson's treatment of the Helm's Deep and Pelennor Fields battles in the last two LOTR movies, this one felt small-time, disorganized, and disjointed. People were running up the castle staircases. They were running down the staircases. Trolls were swinging their sticks. But it didn't feel like any of it mattered. Instead, they felt like background noise as Harry and friends ran around looking for puzzle pieces.
Now, I think a significant part of it is just that, as much as it might seem to at first glance, the Harry Potter series doesn't necessarily lend itself to great movies. I'm gonna spend some time now talking about things I don't like about the series, not because I don't think it's a hell of a series (there's a reason hundreds of millions if not billions of people love it; and I definitely enjoyed it a whole lot), but because I think the book's shortcomings are a big part of what hamstrings the movies. What J.K. Rowling does better than just about all other authors is create a fantasy world that captures you as a reader. There's a certain authenticity to it that's awesome, especially for people like me who grew up on this series. But, given just how good she is at that, people overlook her weaknesses as a writer, which are magnified in the movies, this one especially. Probably the smallest problem is that she doesn't write epic battles well. Which is fine, but epic battles are kind of important to movies, and if those epic battles don't feel all that urgent (and in these movies I don't think they do), that's a bigger deal for the movie than it is for the book, just because climactic battles are necessarily a big deal for movies.
Then there are the bigger problems, and there are two that stand out in particular. First, Rowling's characters just aren't particularly good. Let's be honest-- every character in the series can be boiled down to three adjectives- Harry is brave, loyal, and selfless. Hermione is smart, loyal, and smart. Ron is... loyal, loyal, loyal, and kind of a clown. And Voldemort is evil. And doesn't have a nose. But when you come right down to it, there's nothing about any of the characters that makes them particularly interesting or multi-dimensional. We care about Harry because he's around for 7 books, and he grows on us, and we know all kinds of bad things will happen if he doesn't get things right, but, to be perfectly honest, there isn't a single character from the books that I come away thinking would be great to hang out with besides Ron's twin brothers. And even that's only because their one-word personality type is "funny". Second, Rowling just isn't very good at plotting. Writing a good plot is about consistency. You lay out a problem and, using the tools at hand, you craft a solution. It's something Arthur Conan Doyle is brilliant at in the Sherlock Holmes series, and something Rowling struggles with. Her magic doesn't really have clear rules, and when she uses it, it turns into a catch-all crutch that can solve any problem when she feels like it. There are plenty of examples, but the most painful one is the time machine Hermione uses in the third book so she can take a bazillion classes. That should be the most powerful tool in the book. If they can go back in time, they could use it to get Harry's parents to change their secret-keeping person from Ron's rat to... well, just about anyone. They could use it to make Voldemort fall off his broom at Quidditch and die at age 12. They could use it for any number of things. Instead, there's some fuzzy banter about time being a "dangerous thing to play with." Well, alright. If that's the case, we're supposed to believe that the only things that are safe to use time for are... letting nerds take more classes than they can fit in a day and rescuing Hagrid's flying horse-monster? As far as I can tell, it was used for that, and then disappeared altogether after that. Then there are the devices that move the plot along. Normally, it starts with "We're looking for something, but we don't know what it is, but through some improbable confluence of random crap, Hermione figures it all out." Yeah, we know, she's "smart." But in these books she's Sherlock Holmse and a half. And not the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock- the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock who isn't just a logical genius, but also knows kung fu. In the movies, this is even more painful, especially this last one. Twice. Harry walks into a big, cluttered room looking for... something. He doesn't really know what it looks like, and the room always looks like your grandparents' garage, if your grandparents' garage was the size of a professional soccer field. So what Harry's looking for comes down to "special object" located in "big, crowded place." That's like taking someone who's never seen a Coke can before, putting them in the Superdome in New Orleans, and telling them to find the Coke can. They might find it someday, but it's gonna take a hell of a lot of time. Somehow, Harry regularly does it in 5 minutes.
It's easier to overlook these weaknesses in a book-- readers come back for the magical world of Harry Potter, and can overlook weak plotting so long as it moves the mythology forward. In a movie, establishing the magical world of Harry Potter takes one movie. The rest, you need to develop the characters and the plots. But, given the so-so source material in that regard, it's almost inevitable that the "epic" last movie falls flat.
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