Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I

Movie review by Dennis D. McDonald

The movie

I’ve enjoyed previous Harry Potter movies but I found this one to be tedious, boring, and pretentious. For the first time I found Harry, Hermione, and Ron to be uninteresting and unengaging.

Some may say that this was natural and due entirely to their having the weight of the world’s fate on their shoulders. I assign blame to the direction. The character and plot threads have just become too complex and intertwined to allow, from this director’s hands, the personalities and humanity of the main characters to emerge. One forced dance sequence or one’s forced friends’ quarrel just aren’t enough. By the end of the movie I just didn’t care about our heroes and found myself really missing Snape and the rest. Hopefully Part 2 is better.

The DVD

I rented the Blu-ray disc from Netflix. Unfortunately it’s a rental only disc that has no extras and forces the viewer to fast forward through an intolerable number of commercials up front. Apparently Netflix is doing everything it can to force people to drop physical discs for streaming.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Dennis D. McDonald