The Beginning of the End

I usually consider the Friday after Thanksgiving one of the worst days to drive to a mall or other shopping venue in order to see a movie. Yet that's exactly what we did. However, I think we were both caught off guard by how few people were at both The Pike and the movies. The matinee we chose for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows turned out to be somewhat underpacked for the 11:20 AM showing. In fact, I think five others were in the theater when we stepped through the doors. We both thought perhaps that parents would drop their kids off at the movies while they in turn hit the stores or the restaurants, but that wasn't the case. At least not at The Pike.

As for the movie, I quite enjoyed the darker tone of the film, finally seeing Harry, Ron and Hermione as adults and dealing with life outside Hogwarts. The film is also loaded with special effects, but rather than sticking out like sore thumbs, they weave seamlessly into the story and add quite a bit to the film's overall effect and appeal. I will say that more characters seemed to pop up and were never explained -- like the Seekers, who appeared quite a few times throughout the film. Even having read the books, I was still overwhelmed by so many people popping in and out for the briefest of moments for some apparently important scene, never to be seen or heard from again, and I wondered if they had appeared in previous movies or the books.

Though I found it to be a good movie, I don't think it can stand on its own. Not having seen the previous films will most likely leave some viewers at a disadvantage, trying to understand who is who and where those references came from and so on. (I think at one point even Ron forgot the story as he misstated the number of Horcruxes left to be destroyed.)

Also, I didn't like how a few scenes tried to mimic the reality show look, with jittery camera movements as in The Blair Witch Project. But overall, the film was a great lead in to the final confrontation with He Who Shall Not Be Named, and I am looking forward to it.

Image from ScreenCrave.