My favorite movie of 2011 should have come out in 2010, but the film studio decided to split the film in two so they could cover more of the book that it was based off better… and charge us viewers twice for the same movie.
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” based off JK Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” marks the finale of the Harry Potter saga about the titular wizard who grows up and faces evil in a final showdown. The books were literary gold that hooked readers and screamed for movie adaptations. Then the movie franchise turned out to do a really good job adapting the hundreds of pages and exposition into visual Cliff Notes of each book.
Initially the best thing about the Harry Potter movies was how well they went through the novels and gave them a much needed trimming of the ancillary set pieces and subplots that were great for exposition but provided little to the actual story. JK’s novels were literary gold but you have to admit they are in dire need of an editor once she started getting paid by the word (around “Goblet of Fire”).
Then whether through JK’s careful planning or her retaliatory retcon over condensing her written work, the final Harry Potter required a trip back to some of the most minute of ancillary detail overlooked in previous books that managed to stall the finale. The result was “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1,” a movie that turned out to be a tedious fetch quest that was visually impressive and managed to trim some of the excessive exposition in that final novel. But that half in itself was also pretty ancillary. Just get to the finale everyone expects… with the epic siege, the final revelations, the climatic duel between good evil, and all of those loose ends tied up.
And that is what “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2″ turned out to be. It cuts right to the chase and provides the battles, the revelations, and the climatic duel between good & evil. Some of the loose ends didn’t tie up as well as I liked. But the final result ended the epic wizardry series on a grand high.
Now it’s simply a waiting game to find out what the next epic novel series will be that doesn’t involve vampires.