Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

Here it is. Finally. The ending that people around the world have been waiting for. Well, people who don’t read, anyway. It’s been building to this very moment for seven films and a whole decade. So how was it? Was it everything you thought it would be and more? Or was it something you had to see just to get closure. Are you relieved that you don’t have to see any more of these wizard movies? Or are you sad because you won’t ever get to again.

This, the eighth and final Harry Potter movie, picks up right where it left off in the last film. Unfortunately the trend these days, in an effort to milk the cash cow until it’s a miserable dried up corpse, is to split up what should be one movie into two. This has the effect of making twice as much money and also two bad films that are each half as good as one good film would have been. So in the first part what you got was a whole lot of building to something with no resolution to speak of, and in this film a whole lot of boring tying-up of loose ends. When you split up a movie like that you take away all the satisfaction that could possibly be gleaned by the audience. The best part of the movie was all the revelations about Snape’s character. The worst part of the movie was the incredibly boring and anti-climactic final battle between the good wizards and the bad wizards. Don’t see it in 3D unless you want to lose your lunch.

Hollywood will never learn the lessons of films like this because they are too greedy to care about quality and the artists are too hungry not to compromise their vision. Some day in the future you will see one movie split up into a hundred bite sized chunks and they will call it “television.” And on that day the cinema will be dead. But until then we are all stuck having to watch movies that are twice as long and half as good as they could have been. It’s bittersweet to dream of the world that could have been.