G'bye Harry

The final installment of the Harry Potter movie series debuted about 10 days ago, but I finally got to see it on Sunday.  It was well done, as were the other seven movies, but I'm not really happy about what they did with the final battle scenes.  Frankly, they screwed it up.

As I watched the movie I realized I was seeing something I didn't recall from reading the book.  The screenwriter, along with other other decision makers, apparently decided the final battle just wasn't action-packed enough as J.K. Rowling wrote it and made some fundamental changes in how the whole thing played out.  They also inflated the role of Neville Longbottom, apparently needing to make him more heroic than he already was in the original story.  It bugged me enough that yesterday I went back and reread the final seven chapters of the book (starting with The Sacking of Snape).  I would encourage anybody that saw the movie to do the same.  The differences from book to film become obvious pretty fast.

Having read all seven books and see the first seven movies, I'm sure there were a few liberties taken here and there in the films, but I can't remember such wholesale plot changes as occurred in the final movie. It may be the first Harry Potter movie that I'll never watch again because of it.  Too bad.  They did so many things right in the earlier films.

All that aside, the end of this 10-year, 8-film series points out how very important it was that they got the first film just right.  Had they messed anything up in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the whole series could have collapsed.  The casting was perfect, the set design and characters were spot on - the whole thing worked marvelously well.  And I can say that as someone who saw the film before ever reading the book.

The rest of my family had read the first book when we went to see the movie, but I hadn't.  They had to do the mental adjustment from the images they already had in mind for the characters and Hogwarts, but for me it was all new and pretty fantastic.  I really liked the movie and decided to read the book after we got home.  I'm not usually a fan of fantasy stuff, but the Harry Potter series captured my imagination and is did millions of others.

It's hard to believe this entire parallel universe could come from one person's imagination, but J.K. Rowling is truly a gifted writer and thinker.  And when the final scene faded to credits, despite my dislike of the story changes in the final scenes, I must admit I felt a little emotion that this 10-year journey was now over.  I don't know if we'll ever see another phenomenon like Harry Potter again.