Deutsche VersionHarry Potter 7a - Review
So I finally got around to watching Harry Potter 7 Episode One, and I thought I’d make a small (spoiler-free) review about it. I will not talk about the plot; you either already read the book and know it all anyway, don’t want me to spoil it for you, or don’t care. Instead, I will talk about how it got translated to the screen.
If I had to sum up my feelings in one word, it would be “epic”. But if you allowed me two, I’d go for “too epic”. Yes, epicness can be overdone, and this movie certainly tries to do so. The director apparently wants that every single image from the movie can be sold as a post card. So we get our three heroes having meaningful looks, wide angle shots all over the place, carefully arranged pictures, all the best special effects money can buy and probably some that take vital organs, and of course lots and lots of gratuitous british landscape. For the most part, that works: Almost every shot seems epic in some way. Helping with that is the color scheme, which is desaturated, cold, blueish, as if this was an ARD or possibly even ARTE production.
The problem is that it is way too epic. All those meaningful expressions seem to replace actual conversation for large parts of the movie, and the dialogue that is there is exposition or incredibly meaningful as well, with the conclusion again drawn in meaningful facial expressions. There is almost no part where anyone just talks normally. Together with the blue color scheme, it all feels cold and distant. The humor that was a large part of the books appears at places, but so infrequently that you feel as if it was just an afterthought. You almost never get the impression that our heroes are not just heroes, but also people and friends.
I promised not to talk about the plot itself and I won’t, but I still think it is interesting to see how it was adapted. There are some scenes that were added and many removed, of course, but many subplots are horribly mangled. The movie seems to assume that we will fill in the blanks ourselves, or more likely have read the book, so it does not explain a lot of the things that are going on. It is also weird that some minor recurring characters get introduced to Harry only here. It makes sense, I guess, but if that were truly their first meeting, then why is everyone acting as if they had always known them anyway? I would probably have just put them there hoping that the movie goers forgot that they weren’t in any previous movies anyway. Considering the large amount of important people who get shown only once or twice, it is impossible to keep track without having read the book anyway.
Personally, I think Harry Potter should never have been made into a movie. The books just do not support that, because there are hardly any side-plots or minor characters that can be cut in the grand scheme of things. I would have preferred for the books to get turned into a TV show with extremely high production values, similar (not in content) to Rome, but without being cancelled after the second season. Any movie of the books will always have to be a bad compromise, even if it is two movies for one book. At least the recent three movies confirmed this for me.
All that being said, it is by no means a bad movie. I had fun watching it and if you liked the previous movies, you will like this one as well.
Written on December 5th, 2010 at 05:06 pm
