Spoil­ers.

I did take time out of my absurd sched­ule to go see Harry Pot­ter & the Half-​​Blood Prince at mid­night on Wednes­day. Which reminds me how irri­tat­ing it is when I go buy a ticket for “12:00am Tues­day” for a 12:00am Wednes­day show­ing. That peo­ple and movie the­atres can­not fig­ure out the mid­night thing con­fuses and infu­ri­ates me. I know movie the­atres count mid­night show­ings as part of the busi­ness day pre­ced­ing, but one would think that in today’s glo­ri­ous age of fancy com­put­ers tick­et­ing and rev­enue soft­ware could be pro­grammed to han­dle this crap in a more sen­si­ble way.

The movie. Hm. Look­ing for nice things to say...

Well it was very pret­tily shot, with lots of expres­sive cam­er­a­work. And Tom Fel­ton out­did him­self and stole the show with so very few lines.

But they ruined the sur­prise end­ing. In the book, it was clear that when Snape made the Unbreak­able Vow with Nar­cissa Mal­foy, he had no idea what the Dark Lord had asked Draco to do. The main drama of the book was in won­der­ing about Snape — what he was think­ing, whose side he was on, and what he was sup­posed to be help­ing Draco do. I can under­stand strip­ping out the details of the motives of the Mal­foys, the Tom Rid­dle back­story, or the sin­is­ter side of Slughorn, but I can­not see why they cas­trated the Snape sto­ry­line. With all they took out, there’s no real story left.

They got rid of the big bat­tle in Hog­warts at the end. I can see that — there’s another big bat­tle in Hog­warts at the end of Part 7, and the vio­lence and shock of Dumbledore’s death should have been plenty for the cli­max. But they took that out, too. There was no sur­prise when Snape killed Dum­b­le­dore; nei­ther in the killing nor in the iden­tity of the killer. And not because we’ve all read the book first.

In short, there is no mys­tery in Harry Pot­ter & the Half-​​Blood Prince. While the 6th book was not my favorite book, it was still inter­est­ing. David Yates & co. actu­ally man­aged to make this install­ment bland and uninteresting.