The Harry Potter series—including the books, the
movies, the videogames, the clothing, the toothpaste, the Weasley
Brothers’ Home Pregnancy Tests—has made $9,392,791,491,891
billion since J.K. Rowling’s first book came out in 1997.
Thanks to totally factual statistics like the one above, it’s easy
to get overwhelmed by the Potter juggernaut—to see the thing as a
monolithic marketing machine, and to forget that why it’s made so
much money is because of a really fucking good story. For their legions
of eager young fans (and slightly creepy older fans), the Potter books
are some of the most imaginative, moving, and captivating novels
that’ve come out in the last decade—so it only follows that the
movies based on them should be equally great.
That hasn’t been the case, though: Chris Columbus’ cluttered
attempts to adapt the first two Potter books inspired more headaches
than delight. Mike Newell’s bland take on the fourth book in the series
merely sufficed (and that was only because of that one kickass part
with the Hungarian Horntail). David Yates’ flat, uninvolving take on
the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, felt
like a checklist of required events, with a forced, unconvincing air of
darkness. In fact, the only decent Potter flick thus far—the only
film that captured Rowling’s sense of both danger and whimsy, of
sadness and humor—was Y Tu Mama También director
Alfonso Cuarón’s fantastic, beautiful adaptation of the third
book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. And so for a
while, it seemed like we’d only get one great Harry Potter film, and a
whole lot of okay ones.
That is until this week, when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood
Prince—based on the sixth book in the series—came
along. Like Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince is
helmed by David Yates, but this time around, he’s far more assured and
inspired—Half-Blood Prince moves briskly and confidently,
has moments of genuine delight and creepiness, is gorgeously shot by
cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, and juggles its preposterously
gargantuan cast and nuanced plot with as much grace as can be expected.
There is melancholy here, and regret, and the sense that for this
series’ once-naïve characters, the stakes are significantly
higher. As in Cuarón’s film, Rowling’s world feels impressively
wrought and realized, and between this installment’s darkness and the
fact that its characters are allowed to grow and emote far more than in
any earlier film, Half-Blood Prince handily feels like the most
mature of the offerings thus far. The sense of daydreamy whimsy from
the earliest films has been replaced with portentous doom; Harry
Potter’s world is still a magical and enviable one, but here, it’s also
in very real danger of being
torn apart.
And yet: For all of its fast-moving, plot-heavy machinations, the
series’ core group of characters—Harry (Daniel Radcliffe),
Hermione (Emma Watson), and Ron (Rupert Grint)—are allowed more
humor and heart than they’ve ever had before, as they try not only to
(A) save the world, but also to (B) deal with enough heartache and teen
angst to make one think that the secret location of Hogwarts is
somewhere in the O.C.
Granted: Half-Prince‘s plot ignores huge chunks of the book
that inspired it, and if you haven’t read the books, you’re totally
boned. But overall, this thing works—it’s genuinely
moving, funny, creepy, and it captures the soul of Rowling’s world and
story—which is, as most of the series’ other films have proven,
no small feat.
