Last night, I went to see the final Pottermovie.
Let me start with a few disclaimers here. The last Potter BOOK that I read was #3. The rest of my Potter experience was movies alone - and I appreciate at the outset that I may be losing out on the minutiae of it all thereby. But speaking of the movies, I thought that #1 was full of precisely the kind of glee and vivid invention that made Rowlings's workd so irresistible. #2 I barely remember. #3 was perhaps my favourite of them, with a certain amount of story and gravitas to it which appealed to me. #4 was ... okay, i guess. With #5 they started getting into the problem of The Bloat, with the books themselves getting bigger and bigger and the commensurate difficulty in stuffing all of that into the movies - so I think it kind of lost momentum a little. #5 was forgettable. #6 was NOTHING HAPPENED in the biggest way and I walked out acutely disappointed in that one. And then we hit Deathly Hallows.
I went to see Part the First when it came out, and honestly, it was everything people said it was - a bunch of teenagers angsting it out while wandering around in the woods. Part the Second, when I went to see that last night, began with a bang - did anybody notice that there weren't even any credits at all? Just the WB logo, the Harry Potter lightning-bolt name thingy fading into the distance on the screen, and bang! We were on.
I struggled a little in the beginning to gather it all together. Where the hell did that goblin come from, again? Oh, it didn't MATTER, in the long term. Harry was galloping around searching for the Hallows. Or was it the Horcruxes? For some reason I keep getting these muddled in my head and have to shake it and sort the concepts out into their respective pigeon holes over and over again. The Elder Wand in particular I appear to have difficulty with - Hallow or Horcrux or kind of sort of both..? But I digress.
The question that I keep getting asked by people in the aftermath of seeing the movie is, "did you have enough tissues?" You want the brutal truth? I didn't cry. Not once. The movie aimed for epic and landed squarely in, yes, sentimental - but sentimental isn't enough to make me cry. And there were things in there which, frankly kept on bouncing me out of the tale - and that isn't the movie. It's the story. It's ROWLINGS.
Just a few examples. The further we get into the story the less I think of Voldermort as arch0villain, and in this last movie he really proves me bitterly right. It's fail all the way. If he's the Greatest DArk WIzard of them all, why bring that army against a school defended by a bunch of panicked and untrained kids and a handful of (by definition) lesser wizards which would probably have fallen to a concerted attack by a bunch of Death Eaters? That whole battle... was... was... SFX, dammit. It was Done For Show. It was done so that we in the audience could sit back and weep for the lost loveliness of Hogwarts (and hey, waddayaknow, the epilogue implies that the whole ruined mess of it was rebult in record time and the next generation of wizardly kids are merrily on their way there!) I kind of love that PA system that Voldemort has by which he can address the entire populace in Hogwarts - and then uses it to berate Harry Potter for not having guts enough to face him, Voldemort, alone but is instead hiding behind Hogwarts (the obvious reply to this is, and you and YOUR fricking army, you hypocrite? If you wanted a one-on-one you knew how to get it...) The Greatest Evil Wizard of all acts like a spoiled child in destroying Snape ("It isn't MY wand, it's YOUR wand, and i WANT it and it isn't fair!") and then gets the pet snake to kill Snape instead of killing him with a word. The Greatest Evil Wizard in the world has obviously not read the Evil Overlord site on the Internet because his response to Neville Longbottom (who is clutching the Sorting Hat which has somehow floated out to the top of all that rubble in the Hogwarts courtyard) saying "I have something to say" isn't to shut the little twit up forthwith (anything he has to say isn't going to be good for Voldemort, no...?) but to stand there smirking like a nasty little classroom Napoleon who has just nabbed a kid in the heinous act of passing a note to a classmate, and saying "I'm sure we'd ALL be fascinated by whatever you've got to say" - which of course they were... And the Greatest Evil Wizard of all is really that wizened little thing coweing under thd bench in the Gateway to Paradise which is really King's Cross Station...? WHy do I get the feeling that Voldemort was kind of into this whole thing only half-heartedly, despite all protestations to the contrary?
Other things - maybe I was already sufficiently out of it by this stage to notice stuff that other people will swear was not there or was not intended - but honestly, how many cultural tropes could you count in all of this? Mama Weasley stepping up in front of Bellatrix and snarling "Not MY daughter, you bitch!" (Hello Ripley. Hello, Alien). Snape conjuring up a patronus, and it's a deer - and it's a Doe, like Lily - but wait a minute - I thought James Potter was a Stag - whcih makes Harry - what - a Double Deer You? And anyway the first thing that flashed through MY head at that point was, so is SNAPE Harry's real father? (cue "I AM your father!" from behind a Dark Mask and a weaving lightsaber...) Harry Potter "talks in his sleep"? (Dr Jones, both of you, step up in that famous scene from "Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail"...) There are more. I can't even remember them now.
Odd things on the periphery - VOldemort's offer to the Hogwarts defenders: "Join me or die" - but er okay maybe it's all explained away in the books but just WHAT were the Bad Guys doing with Hagrid in the forest there? Hagrid would not have joined them, so why was he not killed? WHy take as a prisoner someone so palpably NOT IMPORTANT - the Hogwarts groundskeeper - and keep him "tied up" by a couple of paltry ropes which he could have snapped with a minimum of effort juat so that he could be present to breathe out a heartfelt "Harry! No!" when Harry Potter walks alone into the dark woods in question where, contrary to the substance of his taunt, the Dark Lord is waiting for him not as one-on-one but with the whole damn cohorot of Death Eaters at his back? You damned coward, Voldemort. Afraid of that kid, are you? And Hagrid was then KEPT ALIVE, and loose enough to be able to carry Harry back to the smitten Hogwarts in his arms for maximum emotional heartstring tugging. I suspect that was one of the moments where I was supposed to have tissues out. ALl I could do instead was sit there trying to come up with a plausible explanation.
Perhaps the most laden moment of the movie DID come in that silly epilogue segment (really, Harry? You're going to send a seven-year-old into the running battle fo a school playground weighed down with a name like Albus Severus?...)when we left our original trio, Ron Hermione and Harry, gazing after the departing train bearing off their offspring - gazing into the future, seeing, perhaps, the past, seeing their own eleven-yaer-old selves sitting in those seats on the train pulling out of Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross Station. Looking down the years of their lives, and into the years to come - what will their children's adventure be...? But the rest of it... the rest of it...
Look, J K Rowlings has a FANTASTIC imagination. She has created an enduring world full of whimsy and invention, and the movies did it full justice. But the story... the story kind of buckles under its own weight. Despite the visual smorgasbord (dragons! spells! people in living portraits! Hogsmeade! suppers such as have never been nor will ever be seen inside a boarding school! owls! potions! moving staircases!) the story reaches for Epic and just never quite gets there. You see... I just never really believed that Voldemort was the Greatest Evil WIzard of All. We were just TOLD that, constantly, over and over and over and over. But it was insane Bellatrix of whom I'd be far more afraid, for instance, because she's, well, NUTS. Voldemort... is the Curtain. And the Man Behind The Curtain turned out to be no better than the little man pretending to be the WIzard of Oz. The Wizard of Oz handed out a diploma and told the Scarecrow it was a Brain. Voldemort handed out death to his arch-enemy... and failed to realise that Harry Potter was not really dead. There are just too many things that have accumulated throughout the series to make me sceptcial of what Voldemort REALLY was - that he was just another wizard, gone to the bad, for sure, and with a strange face calculated to inspire revulsion and fear, but hardly the end-it-allapocalyptic nightmare that he had been painted as. And in the end the hero is just as strong as the strongest villain he opposes - and Voldemort was WEAK. Sorry, but he was.
Damn, sometimes it is just hell being a writer. You can't help but analyse. Or maybe it isn't quite that - it's just that it's impossible not to analyse when you find yourself outside the story - and I was (perhaps a minority of one, I don't know, but there you have it) very much outside the story. And from the outside - well - it's like being backstage instead of being out in the audience. The audience are seeing things from a "proper" perspective and "buying" the play; from the back, all you can see is how the set was built, and where it's fragile and fraying...
Oh well. it was a social phenomenon of our times. Arguably it got a generation of kids reading. Kudos for that.
Rest, Harry. The journey is done.
