The following is in response to a review of the film on a blog. It is a terrible review, and perhaps the worst review of any film I've ever read.
For starters, I need to question your intelligence if you actually think you can invoke RotK as a movie that tied up all the loose ends. I'm left wondering if the writer was high. Quick quiz: how did RotK resolve the issue of Sauruman? It didn't. He wasn't in the movie at all, unless you're talking about the director's cut, but since this is about a theatrical release of HP7.5, an apples-to-apples will need to focus on the theatrical version of RotK. In RotK, I spent the whole damned movie waiting to see Sauruman get dealt with in a manner that I expected would entail a kick-ass wizard battle. In fact, my words to the missus on the way home from HP7.5 were, "If Return of the King had done its job, that movie [HP7.5] would have never been necessary." And by that, I mean LOTR in general managed to deliver epic battles, but for the genre at large, it completely failed in displays of kick-ass magic. There's very little, and while there's very little in the book, at least the book has things like Gandalf hurling massive fireballs in the cave battle sequence. Why would anyone cut displays of magic out? That's just dumb. And the only confrontation we get between Gandalf and Sauruman is, in all due respect, tantamount to the battle between Raziel and Bavmorda at the end of Willow, with simply hurling one another around with invisible force.
If you had read the book (LOTR), you wouldn't have expected a quick dealing with Sauruman in the immediate wake of the battle at Eisengard, but you would at least think he needed to be dealt with. But the theatrical film doesn't address the #2 bad guy and the biggest threat of the second film at all, whatsoever. It just pretends either he doesn't exist, or that he decided to fade from the scene, or maybe the Ents decided to pull guard duty for the rest of eternity and Sauruman is too stupid to figure out how to escape.
Next up, this blog entry tries to say Alan Rickman overacts, while PoA is one of the best movies in the series in keeping with the feel of the book. To that, I can only invoke the immortal words of Dolemite: "Bitch, are you for real?!?" Rickman is a GD genius and if you thought that he did bad acting, you clearly wouldn't know good acting if it bit you on the ass. As for the POS PoA, it gets to this point at the end where Sirius first sees Lupin, they give each other Snidely Whiplash comically villainous smiles, and then Cuarón turns on the "CHEW SCENERY" sign and gets Oldman to do what is, without a doubt, the worst acting of his cinematic career, so help me.
Cuarón is not a bad director, not in the least, and Children of Men is quite brilliant. But he is the worst thing to ever touch the Harry Potter film series, hands down. A lot of this is due to his attitude, as summed up by a statement he made in the bonus footage on the DVD, where he talks about having a "blank canvas" to do whatever he could imagine. No, you arrogant bastard, you do not have a blank canvas. Rowling is responsible for the composition, and Chris Columbus has already filled out more than a quarter of it. In terms of the feeling of the film, it was erratic, with a bunch of highly incongruous Toontownesque antics reminiscent of Saturday morning cartoons juxtaposed against something that should invoke fear. The entire film is devoid of nuance or subtlety, and if we want to get into loose ends, don't even get me started on how poorly the film handled the Marauder's Map.
I think a lot of people who read the books first fail to realize how absolutely dumb PoA is to anyone that didn't read the book and still tried to follow the plot. First and foremost, they NEVER explain what the map is, nor who "Mooney, Wormtail, Prongs, and Padfoot" are. They invoke these names later in the film series, but you never know where the names come from, nor how the map was made, nor how Lupin knew what the map was and how to operate it. Nor is any explanation made as to how a map that is "never wrong" doesn't depict the location of, say, the Chamber of Secrets. It's all perfectly clear if you know the book, but if you don't, it looks like Rowling is a sloppy idiot and the entire series is poorly thought-out and full of plot holes.
You know what I call a movie that only makes sense if you read 435 pages of accessory text? I call that a piece of crap. Goblet of Fire was the first film that managed to stand on its own two legs as a film, and not coincidentally, it wasn't until I'd seen GoF that I decided to finally read the series and discover what an awesome book Cuarón had managed to FUBAR.
As for Teddy Lupin—okay, I get it, you're pissed because a particular favorite scene was left out of the movie. We all have those, and I think that for every book I'd read prior to the release of the film, my absolute favorite scene was eliminated. In OotP, it was Peeves bowing to the Weasley twins after their magnum opus (the non-inclusion of Peeves from SS had already prohibited this possibility). In HBP, it was the pensieve visit to the home of Morfin and Merope. And in DH, it was seeing Luna's bedroom with the pictures of her friends on the ceiling. At least for Teddy, he was there if you knew what to look for, just as those who've read the book knew the cup belonged to Helga Hufflepuff even if the editors decided that the average movie watcher didn't need to know that nor cared.
Missed opportunities for a small mention that would have brought in an important part of the plot irk us all, but unlike the Marauder's Map, Teddy Lupin wasn't a plot point upon which understanding the larger film hinged. One missed op does not a bad movie make.
Next, why did Bellatrix explode? Simple. A lifeless corpse falling to earth after a flash of green is how Death Eaters kill; not heroes, and we don't want to see the heroes turn into villains. It's been well-established that Ginny does a kick-ass Reductor curse, and it was fitting that her mother use something akin to that in her defense.
As for Neville being reduced to "slapstick"—William H. Macy on a pogostick, you're actually complaining about one of the maybe three funny moments in what is, without a doubt, the most humorless film in the series? Now you're just picking nits for the sake of picking nits. His ultimate triumph over Nagini was if anything more triumphant than in the book. Rather than a quick opportunistic blow after smack talking to Voldy as in the book, the movie gave Neville a moment of great bravery in a very dangerous task at the bridge, and then followed this up with him slaying Nagini after Ron and Hermione—the two who'd already had a number of amazing victories—completely and utterly failed, allowing Neville to slay the snake while actively saving a friend to boot. I was worried from before the films beginning that Neville may be denied his due, but they went out of their way to give him everything Rowling staked out for him and more.
I remember when I was a kid and my elder sister gave me the advice of always saying you prefer a musician's/band's old work better. It gives this air of authority, as though you've been listening to the bad since before they got big. The silliness of this approach is well demonstrated in the movie 25th Hour when Anna Paquin asks Phillip Seymour Hoffman about DJ Dusk—who was apparently 16—and Hoffman says he likes his old stuff better, and Paquin laughs at him. I once read an article about "Artful Dodging," wherein one manages to make an implication of erudition or sophistication by allaying a question with a misleading answer. An example given was, when asked if one had read Don Quixote, the person replied, "Not in English." The writer of the article thought this was marvelous, because it simultaneously implied 1) he had read the book, 2) he could read 17th century Castilian Spanish, and 3) the differences between that language and a modern English translation were large enough to prevent meaningful dialogue about the book. While that writer thought that was brilliant, I think that makes you look like an ass hat, and I think that "the book was better" has become a cliché akin to "I like their old music better." It's trite and hackneyed. By now, we get it: movies eliminate a lot of what we like about books, and there are almost always subtleties and nuances sacrificed for the Silver Screen. Get the hell over it. It's one thing to cite true, meaningful violations of the author's vision, and another altogether to reflexively return "book was better." The truth is that there isn't a single legitimate complaint you can make against Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II that you couldn't launch tenfold against every other film. For crying out loud, they actually broke the book into TWO PARTS in order to make more than 4 hours of screen time to address the plot as fully as conceivable, given the constraints of the film industry.
If you hated HP7.5, you simply really wanted to hate HP7.5, and there was probably nothing that the filmmakers could have done to satisfy you. Limitations of the medium notwithstanding, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II was done amazingly well. I'd have to give another viewing to decide how it competes with numbers 4 and 5 for the title of best in the series.
