"Only I can live forever."
IMDB it (Part 1)
IMDB it (Part 2)
Plot Summary: Really? If you don't know what Harry Potter's about you've either been living under a rock or imprisoned in an Austrian basement for 18 years. Either way, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows splits into two parts the final chapter of this franchise. Who will win - good or evil? I'm not much of a gamblin' man but I'm willing to put my money on "good."
I'm going to preface this by saying I have not read the Harry Potter books (I know... shocking, right?). That being said, I still love these movies and I'm very excited for this final one. Harry Potter has grown up and so have the movies. Each movie has been darker than the last, and this trailer leads me to believe that's not about to change. It started out as a light-hearted kid's tale about a boy whose fame precedes him due to being the only one who's ever survived an encounter with He Who Shall Not Be Named. Now, it's transformed into a deep multi-layer character story on good and evil. Not bad for a "kid's movie."
There are lots of elements in this trailer that make me excited for these movies: the promise of an epic battle between good wizards and bad, dragons, Ron kicking some butt finally, the increasingly graceful Hermione, and a final wizard-off between Harry and Voldemort amidst the ruins of Hogwarts. Very exciting, indeed! I've heard some complain about it being in two parts, and to that I say BOLLOCKS! The book is a whopping 1,322,098,234 pages and if they tried to cram it all into one movie it would be absolutely terrible.
Oh, and it's going to be in 3-D! After having seen Avatar 3 times, I'm fully on board with movies in 3-D. But not the kind the hokey kind that throws stuff at your face to try and make you jump - save that for the 80's. I'm talking about the kind that makes you forget for a second that you're watching a movie and gives you the feeling that you're standing next to the camera watching it being filmed. And I'm hoping that's what this is going to be like. When I saw the Half-Blood Prince in IMAX, the first 15 or so minutes was in 3-D and that looked very promising. I'm hoping it either looks the same or better for these.
I've got to hand it to the cast of these movies - each one has played their parts excellently and I've never felt like anyone's phoned it in. My favorite character is probably Bellatrix Lestrange, if only because Helena Bonham Carter plays crazy so well. But I've also got to give director David Yates heaping amounts of praise. He really took over the previous two films and injected a sense of danger and vulnerability that was missing from previous installments and I'm excited to see what he's done with these last two. Don't get me wrong, Chris Columbus did a great job keeping the playful and sheltered tone needed to draw in the young audience - the same he used for his 90's classics Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire. And I have to hand it to Warner Brothers for utilizing different directors like Alfonso Cuaron (Y tu mama tambien = awesome) and Mike Newell to give these movies a breath of fresh air and help mature them with their characters and audience. There was a rumor a while back that Guillermo del Toro (of the epic Pan's Labyrinth) was going to direct these chapters - how incredibly AWESOME would that have been?? But I'm confident Yates is perfectly capable of finishing the job wonderfully.
It's sad to think that next year will be the last year we see a Harry Potter movie. The first would have debuted 10 years prior so it's become somewhat of a normalcy that one is always around the corner. The Sorcerer's Stone was on TV recently and I almost fell off the couch when I saw how young the kids looked. It's crazy to think the first time I saw this movie was in the form of an illegally downloaded copy in my freshman college dorm room. Good times.
Verdict: Opening Weekend
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