Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince

Of all the Harry Potter books, Half Blood Prince is probably the most difficult to adapt. The story is largely setting things up for the seventh film, leading to one of the most dramatic endings of all the Potter adventures, but it’s a conclusion that’s undoubtedly a downer and has a big ‘To Be Continued’ sign hanging over it.

Much of the book involves Harry and Dumbledore jumping into flashbacks of a youthful Voldemort and a lot of things getting explained in a rather talky fashion, with surprisingly little action. It means the filmmakers certainly had a tough job, but they also had a slight advantage that they didn’t have before. Previous movies had to be careful not to miss out anything that might become vital in a later story, but with all the novels now published, the makers of Half Blood Prince could actually pick out what’s vital and what isn’t, and also alter a few things to make it work better on screen.

The movie opens with Dumbledore and Harry going off to try and convince an old Hogwarts teacher, Horace Slughorn (new Potter recruit Jim Broadbent), to return to the school. Dumbledore wants the true version of one of Slughorn’s memories, which he believes is vital to helping in the battle against evil wizard Voldemort. Harry’s main job for most of the movie is to retrieve this memory, which admittedly isn’t exactly the grandest adventure for the Chosen One, but there’s plenty going on elsewhere to keep the momentum up. Draco Malfoy has a terrible task to perform for Voldemort, Severus Snape is lurking around being enigmatic (he and Dumbledore are the only teachers to get much screentime) and there’s a lot of teen angst and hormones rushing around. This leads to a dramatic finale that changes all the rules.

The filmmakers seem to have been paying attention to what Alfonso Cuaron did with Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, where playing up the human angle makes all the wizardy darkness seem a lot more dramatic. And the world of Hogwarts is certainly a lot darker this time around, literally. Director David Yates blanches the warms colours of the first Potter movies and replaces it with a gothic world of gloomy shadows, as if the threat of Voldemort has leached into the school’s walls.

The result is a film where the sense of this being a life and death drama is more palpable than ever as it moves between the looming menace of Voldemort and his followers (including a spectacular opening attack on London, which wasn’t in the book), and the more humorous burgeoning adulthood of the main characters. Ron spends much of the film snogging Lavender Brown, Harry’s got the hots for Ginny, and there’s even a bit of experimentation with illicit substances, with Ron inadvertently taking a love potion and Harry gets drunk on liquid luck. However there’s also a sense of events forcing people to grow up before their time, which is particularly true for Draco Malfoy, whose story is more poignant on film than it was in the book, while the end of the movie shows how the innocence of discovering love and having fun are going to have to be set aside in the final films. Oddly though the ending in the film is slightly more muted than in the book, which is a great shame.

As with all the Potter films, it’s difficult to tell how much people who don’t know the books will enjoy the movie. They’ll probably get the gist of most things, but some of it will likely be a bit confusing for the uninitiated. This problem is somewhat lessened by the film being less slavishly faithful to the book than previous instalment, instead focussing on the core story and its themes.

Although this slightly freer approach might annoy some Potter fanatics, for the most part it works well, particularly the added humour (Harry’s far more angry and morose in the book), which ensures the lengthy 153-minute runtime doesn’t drag. But despite this being the second longest Potter movie, the film still has to rush through what it does include in order to make sure everything’s set up for Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows (which will, of course, be turned into two films). It makes for a fairly talky film, with less action than you might expect after the events of Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, but even so it never gets dull.

While in some respects the film is a bit of a stopgap, filling in many of the details that only become important in The Deathly Hallows, what could have been the most boring of all the Potter movies is given far more life by added humour, extra hormones and a real sense of the humanity behind the magic.

Overall Verdict: Although much of it exists to set up the seventh and eighth films, this lengthy Potter instalment is nevertheless a very addition to the canon.

Reviewer: Phil Caine