I swear I'm the only person who thought that movie was absolute trash D:
Nope, you're not. The movie was completely empty. Nothing more than a string of love stories. And poor ones at that
And I hate this whole "duh, they left out important scenes" attitude. It's a book-to-movie translation, for !@#$%'s sake, forget the book and suspend disbelief. They have to speed things up.
I know and understand that. You only have 3 hours of movie against an infinite hours of book. Lucky, they decided that the 7th book will be split in two movies. You've got 6 hours of movie then.
At least they made it entertaining and coherent. Try admiring how the film makers actually picked out as many of the entertaining scenes that they could, and left out the boring political ones, in stead of whinging that the entire book wasn't there.
And that is the problem. The scriptwriters picked the least entertaining parts and above all the least relevant parts and they made it worse. Even the best C-class love movie had a better love story. I have to admit that the book is crap to begin with, but they picked out the worst parts and made a movie about it and even left the worst parts empty.
Harry and Ginny's kiss was !@#$% weak.
Well that was one of things the movie improved on the book and contained more substance than the book had.
OK, there were some good parts. The movie really improved on the inner turmoil of Malfoy with his assigned task. Considering the rest of the movie is rather mediocre, Tom Felton must have done some good acting. Harry's obsession with Malfoy is written a lot better. I was almost expecting Harry to accuse Malfoy of something every 5 minutes, like in the book. The special effects and CGI are top notch, as well as the sets. The inside of the Burrow looked really a whole lot better then in the previous movies.
Unfortunately the bad things are a whole lot more. Overall the movie was empty and devoid of emotion. It was nothing more than a string along of several love stories with no substance, nor relevance. Even a C-flick can bring better romance to the screen. Also the love acting is bad. The best example is Jessie Cave playing Lavender Brown. Cute face, but poor acting. Well it could also have been poor directing and writing, because the rest wasn't that much better.
And because the movie focused so much on the love stories it seems more coherent than the more recent movies, but in fact it is not. That is assuming that the final two movies based on the 7th book will only contain events from the 7th book. Do they want to bring back any coherence with the 7th book, they will be forced to put in a lot of the 6th book in the next movie. This movie left out so much relevant stuff, that the people who have never read the books, will have a hard time following the movies on book 7.
A number of sidestories are started which aren't finished and left open unended empty bits. For example the quidditch tournament. The movie contained the pitching for the players and even the events of and around the first game, which are nothing more than events for another love story. But the entire ordeal that Harry gets detention so often and has to go to Dumbledore for lessons and Harry is unable to do his task as Captain of the team, is completely ignored.
The first half of the movie is rushed to cover about 6/8th of the book. And it is filled with irrelevant content. Content about Voldemorts youth and Harry's continuous conflict with Snape is completely left out. Instead it is filled with lovestories, which have no meaning to the complete series or the 7th book. The strengthening of Harry's relationship with Dumbledore for more depth at the end is also unattended. And the Half-Blood Prince (which is the title of the movie) is completely sidetracked and only mentioned at halfway and at the end to let the title make sense. But maybe that is the fault of the book, because the mentioning of the Half-Blood Prince is only done during the arguing between Harry and Hermione about the dangers of the book. What the movie writers should have added, was that Hermoine had found that there was a witch attending hogwarts once with the last name Prince and that Snape is her son. Which of course is immediately discarded by Harry as an attempt to make him throw away the book and it can't be true because Snape is the big bad guy.
The second half of the movie is filled with almost literally retelling two chapters of the book in the movie. The parts in the cave and underground lake and Dumbledore's assassination. And I mean 'almost', because the revised assassination actually reveals a major plot twist from the 7th book. And due to bad directing or screenwriting a lot of emotion gets lost. And after this the movie gets quickly wrapped up with Snape revealing he is the Half-Blood Prince (which was also emotionless) and Harry deciding not to return to Hogwarts.
While in the book after the assassination of Dumbledore the war between wizards becomes apparent. You've got the Order of the Phoenix and Dumbledore's Army fighting against the Deatheaters. With a lot of chaos and destruction. There is supposed to be a WAR going on and it is completely ignored in this movie. Instead the dinning hal gets a bit messed up and the so-called big fight (NOT) is at the Burrow during X-mas. At the Burrow Harry's bond with Dumbledore should have been strengthend when he defends him against the minister of magic. And when the fighting stopped, there was a funeral for Dumbledore with all the good wizards and witches and all kinds of magical creatures paying their last respects. With a grand display of magic from the creatures a big white tomb is erected which house Dumbledore's body, which is pretty relevant to the 7th book. This marks the end of a great wizard and the end of a great obstacle against Voldemort.
To conclude my review. This movie stands on its sublime use of special effects and CGI. Has great sets and environments. But for all it does right it does so much more wrong. Maybe it is the problem of the book already being a bad story to begin with, but the storywriters managed to make a bad story even worse. The only thing about the story that was done right was Draco Malfoy. To bad the writers ripped out the relevant and most entertaining parts of the book and thickened the irrelevant lovestories. The movie may seem coherent and flowing more natural than the previous movies, but it has no coherence with any previous movie (with the exception of the diary) or the 7th book.
Overall the movie is empty of relevance and shows little in the way of emotions. It is however hard to tell if it is due to bad directing by the directors, bad screenwriting by the writers, bad storytelling by JK Rowling and/or bad acting by the actors. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is absolutely the worst Harry Potter movie and serves as a good example that a bad book can't be translated into a good movie. In my opinion they had to do with this and the 5th book as they plan on doing with the 7th and that is splitting it in 2 movies.
