I don't know if anyone has posted this, but I noticed a lack of a Wormtail death scene, am I wrong?
According to a Mugglenet podcast I heard some time ago, they never filmed anything in DH part 2 for Wormtail. They didn't film a death scene for him in part 1, either.
OK, good, I'm not going crazy then. I thought maybe he had died in
The Deathly Hallows, Part 1 and I had just forgotten. It's very weird that we don't see him die on screen since I'd gotten the impression that he was one of Voldemort's main henchmen. Certainly, considering he was central to setting the entire franchise in motion when he told Voldemort how to find the Potters, it's a shame that he doesn't get some kind of cinematic comeuppance. They could have made him the guy that gets blown up on the bridge or something. (Or the bridge-getting-blown-up guy could have been Barty Crouch Jr. I need some more evil David Tennant, dagnabbit!)
For Deathly Hallows part 2, I really enjoyed most of it; I thought the ending of the book was unnecessarily convoluted and that Steve Kloves did the best with the material that he could. I wish Neville had just taken the snake's head off after his speech, and the Molly/Bellatrix fight worked better on-page than on-screen, but Harry snapping the elder wand didn't bother me (though I wish he'd have fixed his own wand first.)
As a movie-only fan, the Molly/Bellatrix fight seemed really random. I mean, of all the characters to take out Bellatrix, they pick Molly? I would have figured it would have been a chance for Neville to avenge his parents.
Finally, a question on something I missed in-movie: How did Snape know where the Trio was in order to plant the Sword of Gryffindor in DH part 1? No Phineas Nigellus in the movie. Or, in the movie, are we supposed to assume that the sword presented itself (at the bottom of the lake?!)
I was under the impression the the sword just magically turns up whenever a Gryffindor has great need of it.
Honestly, I think the Harry Potter series is one that could actually pull off a decent set of prequel films. There is obviously enough in the books to tell a decent story about James, Lily, and the others of their generation.
Agreed, but maybe just 1 movie. Whenever my hardcore Potter-head friends explain something about their backstory to me, I always think it's a lot more interesting than the movie I'm actually watching.
That's fine, but I still don't know if it's fair to even use the book as backup here. The movies need to stand on their own.
That's what I would have thought. Unfortunately, the last couple movies seem to be Kloves & Yates saying, "Fuck off!" to everyone who hasn't read the books. I honestly couldn't make heads of tales of this movie most of the time.
Too much of it was spent (re)introducing characters just long enough to be recognized but not long enough to actually care about them, like Bill, Fleur, Hagrid, Tonks, Lupin, Molly, Arthur, Fred & George, Slughorn, Trelawny, Dumbledore's brother, etc. Meanwhile, other characters that I'm quite fond of like Wormtail, Barty Crouch Jr., & Moaning Myrtle never show up at all. I also felt like Draco's storyline was a bit underdeveloped.
I also couldn't keep track of all of the various mystical McGuffins and the relevance they were supposed to have to the story. The invisibility cloak never seems to play into the ending at all. The convoluted ownership of the Elder Wand feels a bit anti-climactic (certainly un-cinematic), although I love the off-hand non-chalance of Daniel Radcliffe's performance when he says, "It's mine." The Resurrection Stone seems to have no importance beyond allowing even more blink-and-you-miss-'em cameos, this time from the dead people (suspiciously lacking Cedric Diggory I noticed
). This is in addition to all of the horcruxes.
Honestly, these movies needed someone like Peter Jackson at the helm, someone with a strong affinity for the source material who also isn't afraid to change things because what works for a book won't necessarily work for a movie. While I was quite fond of the 1st 6 movies, these last 2 feel more like bloated tie-in merchandise for book fans; of no individual artistic merit whatsoever.
The only time this movie really comes into its own was during the Snape flashbacks but even that confuses me quite a bit.
One simple change I would have made to help streamline things: At the beginning, I would have had Lupin & Tonks in the safehouse with their new baby in place of Bill & Fleur. That way, Lupin's baby doesn't just suddenly get mentioned out of the blue after he's dead. It's a minor change but I think emblematic of the kinds of changes they would have needed to make to make this stand on its own as a movie.
The films simply do not explain some stuff, which can be a bit frustrating, but you can only put so much exposition in a film. The most obvious one in the whole series is in Prisoner of Azhkabhan, where the film does not bother explaining who the Marauders were!
We don't need to know the origins of the Marauders Map. However, the movie really brushes over exactly how Wormtail betrayed the Potters to Voldemort.
And considering the movie always depicts the petronus as a shield instead of an animal, it makes absolutely no sense when the stag shows up to save Harry from the Dementors and even less sense when it leads Harry to assume that his father has somehow come back from the grave to save him.
(But kudos to
The Order of the Phoenix for slipping in a line about the difference between the animal petronus & the shield petronus. Nice retcon.)
The second most obvious is the first film, in which Harry gets the invisibility cloak from an anonymous benefactor, but they never tell us who it was.
Oh yeah. In the books, do we ever find out who that was?
Okay, it was one way to remove the threat of the thing, but it was far too simplistic. And he ought to have repaired his own wand first.
) would get them, but thankfully sanity prevailed.
