Long one

Days ago, I said something about following up with my thoughts on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and I have finally found the motivation to do it. Spoilers abound, because there was a lot of shit from the book left out.

First, let's talk about how I like it when they leave shit from the book out. For example, that whole thing with Tonks and Lupin is so gross, and Tonks spends the book being so pathetic, and ugh. They're still in the movie; they're together in the movie--I imagine because they're two of the three big deaths at the end--but it's not gross. And it's not a bleeding waste of time.

The only important bit of information we pick up from this whole werewolf romance shit is that a person's Patronus can change its shape. This becomes important in relation to Snape some hundreds of pages into the last book. I don't know if they'll, like, make that explicit in the movie, but the shape of Snape's Patronus is the reason Dumbledore trusted him.

As much as I lament the lack of older Weasley brothers in the movies, it is a relief that the whole weirdness with adding Fleur to the family is dropped completely. So is Percy's feud with the family--he was in the last movie, with the Minister, but no one ever talks about it. That's fine by me.

The Ministry of Magic is completely absent from the movie, which I found to be odd, if only because it becomes very important in the next book who is controlling the Ministry. I guess we don't really need to worry about that until the Ministry is in the hands of the Death Eaters, but still, there's this whole back and forth with the Ministry and Harry--now that they believe him, they want him to be their poster boy, and Harry's like, "Fuck you, dillweeds."

The trouble with making these books into movies is that there is so much information packed into the books, readers expect to see at least most of it presented in the movie. We learn so much about Tom Riddle in the book that is nowhere in the movie. What infuriated me most about the movie was its treatment of horcruxes. We get the explanation of what they are from Slughorn's memory, finally, and then Harry's like, "Ack! They could be anything!"

And Dumbledore actually says, "They could be common household objects," or something close to that, and I was like, "No! That was the whole point of your 'lessons' with Harry! To understand the way Voldemort thinks--to know that he would use trophies as horcruxes! Something from each of the Hogwarts founders, for example!" Blarg.

The way the movie ends, Harry has no idea where to find another horcrux. The way the book ends, he knows he is after Voldemort's snake, Helga Hufflepuff's goblet, and something owned by Rowena Ravenclaw or possibly Godric Gryffindor. The diary and the Peverell family crest ring have been destroyed, and Salazar Slytherin's locket is missing, possibly destroyed already. Three known horcruxes/three guessed horcruxes.

One thing I noticed in re-reading the book (spoiler!) is that Harry actually runs into Ravenclaw's diadem when he's hiding the Prince's book in the Room of Requirement. He puts a tiara on a bust of someone near his hiding spot so he can find it again. If only he'd known what it was, eh?

Anyway. One of the things I never really understand is why, when a movie leaves so much of a book out, it finds time to add things in. There is this truly bizarre scene in the middle of the movie where Bellatrix Lestrange just apparates right up to the Burrow, with two other Death Eaters, and sets it on fire. Like, what? The best I can come up with is that it was the movie's way of showing us how deep we are in the shit at this point. Throughout the book, we get news of Hogwarts students' family members being killed, and all the Ministry stuff and the emptiness of Diagon Alley and all that are a pretty good indication, but the movie uses the destruction of the Burrow, I think, to show us that no one is safe anymore. Nothing will ever be the same now.

Something else I find weird is how Lavender and Parvati have only shown up in the movies in relation to the boys. Parvati and Padma have to be in the fourth movie, because they're Ron and Harry's dates to the Yule Ball, and Parvati gets to face the boggart in the third movie, and Neville tell the boys he heard Parvati saying Hermione was bawling in the ladies' in the first movie, but we never even hear of Lavender until this movie, where she must appear because Ron starts going with her and making Hermione jealous. But now Parvati's missing. The books treat them as a pair, basically, so it feels lacking to have one without the other. At one point in the book, Harry and Parvati even briefly--and mostly non-verbally--commiserate over the madness their best friends are entangled in, which I thought was a nice touch.

Now I'm just over-nit-picking, so I guess I'll call it a day. On the whole, I enjoyed this movie a lot, but there's always so much trouble when you try to squash a giant book into 2 and a half hours. That's why I feel like the Narnia movies are such successful adapations--they took something small and expanded it into something wondrous. Anyway. When's the first part of the final installment come out, again?