Harry Potter: Hail and Farewell to a Hallowed Franchise

  • Share
  • Read Later
Warner Bros.

A scene from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

"It's very impressive, isn't it?" observes moony Luna Lovegood, the hippie Hogwarts student, in the early moments of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. It is indeed impressive; and we mean not just this solid, satisfying final film — in which the Potter saga reaches its climax, if not quite its emotional apex — but the entirety of producer David Heyman's blockbuster franchise. One imagines future generations will watch it, in its nearly 18-hour expanse, as one sprawling, enthralling story. "Please, Mom and Dad, can we see just one more episode? It's only 3 a.m."

An eight-part fantasy epic with a dead-serious tone — and the unusual goal in these facetious movie days of being iconic, not ironic — the Harry Potter films of course had the benefit of a bedrock constituency: the tens of millions of worldwide fans of J.K. Rowling's wizardly septology. But the filmmakers could have failed their source material, as the would-be alchemists of countless other books for young readers have before them. Instead, they saw their roles as caretakers of a sacred text, transferring Rowling's young hero and his ageless benefactors and adversaries to the screen with a kind of buoyant reverence that often stirred the spirit and never dropped the Quidditch ball.

Ah, Quidditch. Remember the innocence of those early films, when the plot could pirouette on who would win the end-of-term match of airborne racquetball? As a decade passed between the publication of Rowling's first Harry Potter volume, in 1997, and its conclusion in 2007, so with the films. The three leads have spent fully half their lives inside the skins and souls of their characters. We've seen Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) sprout chest hair, Emma Watson (Hermione) cleavage and Rupert Grint (Ron) a foot or so in height. The franchise's core audience has grown up with them, making it hard to recall that, back in 2001 when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's [Philosopher's] Stone made its debut, many skeptics doubted that kids could sit through a 2½-hour movie without a bathroom break. Who knew that narrative rapture could overcome bladder imperatives?

And who predicted, back then, that the series — which had a laborious birth under Chris Columbus' directorial midwifing of the first two episodes — would grow in cinematic stature under three other directors and become a cohesive long-form work that nearly rivals Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy in expertise, intensity and grandeur? Credit screenwriter Steve Kloves, who wrote every script but that of Order of the Phoenix, with judicious pruning and a knowledge of the epic's internal pressure points, and the technical crew headed by production designer Stuart Craig for visualizing the landscape of Hogwarts and beyond with such lavish, meticulous creativity. Kids who've grown up with these movies will be forever spoiled, assuming that all fantasies should look Harry Potter–rich.

Those in charge of wrapping up the story — Kloves again as writer and David Yates in his fourth term as director — assume that everyone knows everything that has happened up to this moment. Thus DH2 begins with the final images from DH1: of the malefic Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) stealing the Elder Wand from the crypt of Hogwarts' late Headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) and of the sepulchral Severus Snape (Alan Rickman), Dumbledore's killer, brooding in his dark aerie. For the few who haven't memorized every aspect of Potter lore, we will say that the Deathly Hallows are three talismans that can lead their carrier to victory: the Elder Wand, a super-invisibility cloak and a Resurrection Stone that secures communication with the dead.

Too much of the last episode allowed Harry, Ron and Hermione to meander in the tracking down of other relics, known as Horcruxes, that turned DH1 into an exhausting version of Western Quest. Finally, the series has to ignore side trips, whole chapters of Rowling exposition and flashbacks — deepest regrets to the sad story of the young Dumbledore siblings; we miss you — to concentrate on the battle between 17-year-old Harry and the towering, snake-faced villain who killed his parents and threatens to rule the wizarding world.

DH2 is, essentially, a war movie, a prolonged siege of Hogwarts, a children's crusade against the Dark Lord and his overwhelming forces. The martial damage wreaked on the school is reminiscent of a blitzed London, a cratered Munich, in World War II — a good-vs.-evil face-off that Rowling surely had in mind as clearly if not as immediately as J.R.R. Tolkien did when he sent the Fellowship of the Ring trudging toward Mount Doom. It is a war for which Harry feels desperately underarmed, physically and intellectually. As he asks Hermione, "When have any of our plans actually worked? We plan, we get there, all hell breaks loose."

  1. Previous
  2. 1
  3. 2