Harry Potter and the Nothing in Particular
There are two ways in which a Harry Potter film can go wrong.
Firstly, the film can focus too much on the main plot of the book. These films follow the plot around every corner, and as a result don’t get around spending a lot of time on that which is most fun; the day to day happenings at Hogwarts, school for witchcraft and wizardry. We get a very nice summary of the book, but summaries tend to less good then the works they are based on.
The opposite can also happen. The film spends the bare minimum of attention on key plot points, and invests the rest of its running time in some excellent visual recreations of our favourite scenes from the book. Thus we get a very nice soap opera, enjoyable due to familiarity to those who read the book, but others might wonder what exactly they should be watching for.
Sadly John Williams left the franchise after the third (and best) film, and we are stuck with annoying sounds produced by Nicholas Hooper. At the cinema, all my attempts to do something about this – ‘Accio John Williams’, ‘Silencio’ and ‘Finite crappy music’ – only resulted in an agitated audience.
The sixth Harry Potter film falls firmly in the latter category. I enjoyed it a lot because, having read the book, I prefer spending an hour or two in the company of those lovely characters over a rehash of a plot I already know. On the other hand, though the books do a pretty good job steering around clichés, the films seem positively determined to hit every single one. Overall though, we were presented some of the very best and funniest scenes from the book, in a way that stayed true to the book, which made me a very happy fan.
That said, the plot could hardly have carried less weight, and this is best illustrated by some key plot points. The audience doesn’t get a lot of time to be shocked by Harry seriously injuring a classmate, for a minute later he is rewarded with a kiss from his new girlfriend. The seriousness of Draco bringing deadly Death Eaters into Hogwarts doesn’t leave too much of an impression either, when these known killers merely inflict some minor vandalism to the great hall, the magical equivalent of trashing a bus stop.
Then there is a pointless intermission in the Burrow. Ginny ties Harry’s shoes as a testament of her love for him, and the Weasly’s house gets blown to pieces. That didn’t happen in the book (both the shoelaces and the explosion), but it was shocking (only the explosion), so that was nicely done. Now how does this tragic event affect the characters in the rest of the film? Not at all is how.
Exactly what kind of knot Ginny used to tie Harry’s shoes remains a subject of fierce debate amongst fans. Several camps, called ‘knotters’, all believe a different knot was made. You can be sure these camps will closely watch the last two films, where Harry’s shoelaces will have to hold while he runs, apparates and apparently even rides a dragon. It is clear that these films will raise the bar for shoe tying higher than cinema has dared to do so far.
However, the ultimate example of a marginalized plot line is the one concerning the Half-Blood Prince. Considering that the character of the half-blood prince doesn’t enjoy the obsession in the film it does in the book, Snape telling Harry at the end of the film, that it is in fact him who is the Half-Blood prince can hardly be called a revelation. No; taking into account that Snape just killed Dumbledore, a proper term for that piece of dialogue would be ‘spectacular anticlimax’ or ‘shitty ending’. A braver person than I would have ignored the title of the book, cut the entire Half-Blood Prince plot strand out and apply for government protection from millions of angry fans. The film would have been better for it.
And to top it off that simply horrific ending line; I myself could have done a better job than “I never realized how beautiful this place was.”