Tonight was the night for The Deathly Hallows and I want to be careful what I say here because I don't want to disappoint anyone and so my recommendation is to not read this post any further until you've seen the movie yourself and further, don't be overly critical if you've read the book or not. Just take it for what it is.

What do I mean by that? I mean, you can't reduce a lifetime to one year; similarly, you can't reduce a book, an entire series of books, in its grand final moments, down to a couple of hours without some amount of sacrifice. With that, I can say:

I saw and felt the struggle that all those involved had with coming up with a suitable intro. To me, that was more engaging than the show itself, because I'm watching it from a learning perspective. That makes it very strange for me, but very engaging.

Overall, I felt that this movie was driven by "the male perspective". We had the "obligatory action scene" at the start. We had scenes with Hermione and Harry that were non existent in the book. (Yes, we can say they existed "in potential", but I think that Hollywood was just capitalizing, and I could feel it.) I could feel the attempt at the manipulation "on me" in this, and I can see through it as if I've got some kind of x-ray vision.

Please, I offer my apologies to the men here, (I don't mean to be derogatory) because we have some of the finest men on the planet, right here!!! Right here on Simply!!! What I'm speaking of is the stereotypical male archetype that still dominates and contributes to the overall thrust (lest I use that word) in movies.

I really wish I had more experience to be more precise here, but overall, I felt that this was built far more on plot and momentum than it was on character.

They toyed in this with the Hermione and Harry relationship, but really, it came to nothing. Whereas, one of my favorite and blessed characters, Snape, who allowed the victim-- the professor of muggle studies to be disposed of by the hand of Voldemort without even a whimper from Snape, opens so many "character doors" for me. Ones that I think, they might have explored, rather than chopping a bunch of scenes in those first ten minutes, trying, "to cover everything". Something we must all aim to learn. We can't cover everything in the first ten. No matter how hard we might try. And indeed, we shouldn't.

I guess you could take any sub character and run with it and make it solid, if you've got a focus and here's what I discovered, when I "wasn't thinking":

This movie fell flat for me, personally because it lacked a theme. It lacked a theme that narrowed the vision of "whose eyes" we were watching through. In other words: The central POV. Even if it were just the audience's POV. I can tell you, at the theatre I was in, many people were getting up mid-movie, to get popcorn or take bathroom breaks. Is it because it was mid afternoon? I don't think so. "Something" in this film was not holding our attention. "Something" was not quite holding this film together as a whole.

I want to give full praise and gratitude for the actors!!! I loved watching them perform.

There were some fabulous scenes in this and I think that anyone who hasn't read the books might appreciate it more than one who has. Books have a way of revealing things that pictures can't. I don't have a clue how that works. Seems like a paradox really. But there it is.

If I had to give the movie marks out of ten, I'd give it a six for satisfaction. Do I think it could have been done better? Absolutely and without a doubt. I'd shift the scene that is "the crux of it all" no pun intended-- the one with Mr. Lovegood where he tells the story of the three men, building a bridge for crossing, but encountering Mr. Death, personified--  I'd shift that to close to the beginning...

For heaven's sake, why not?! This is the name of the book. This, is the theme. Or at least is one of the themes, but it was lost because they chose instead to focus on some trivial belief that...

The fascination with a love triangle between Harry, Ron and Hermione and that that would be enough to call in the audience...

It would be. Under the right foundation. But, dear Hollywood, you started with chopped fragments. Then, moved to that action...

Ultimately, I see through your fascade. Sucks to be you. I know. Stress. Those damn people on the phone hounding you to produce. Whatch gonna do?

Amen anyways! For all the fine points-- Kudos!

Sandra

To me, the movie was fine. It was better than some of its predecessors and to an extent, it's difficult to judge the final product because it is even titled "part 1," so they knew they couldn't fit it all in. This one also followed the book about as well as the first two movies did in that they stuck very closely to the source material. The meaning of the Deathly Hallows wasn't revealed in the book until some distance in. Harry, Ron, and Hermione did wander about for that first half of the book without a lot of direction, and I worried about how that would translate. I thought they did well. And the perceived love triangle was in the book, but just as in the movie, it was all in Ron's head, and wasn't really going on. At no point did Harry and Hermione really go past their platonic relationship.

What we're dealing with here is a sort of exception to our normal movie. It is a book adaptation so we can judge it on that that, but it's also the 7th film in a series that builds upon itself and this 7th one, more than those before before it, is a direct continuation of the events of the 6th. So trying to reckon this movie on its own would be like taking Thursday's episode of a five part miniseries and trying to grade it on its own.

My opinion is that if you've gone through the previous six films, you'll probably enjoy this one. If you haven't, you'll be almost immeasurably lost because they don't even bother with character at this point. If you don't know the three leads (and everyone else) by now, you haven't been paying attention. There aren't very many new characters here.

In the end, this worked as well as it could for me. I'm very grateful they got Steven Kloves back to do the screenwriting after someone else did part 5. Kloves did the first four, did something else while someone else did 5, and then came back for the last three. You can tell the difference. This guy worked directly with the author on writing the screenplays, and I recall some interviews where when he was writing the scripts she would tell him what he absolutely could not leave out for future installments so everything was accounted for...but since the later books were not written when the first movies came out, she wouldn't tell him why.

Like I said, though, I liked it, and I look forward to the last one to wrap it all up...and so Sandra can get some absolution over Snape. If you haven't read the book, I most certainly won't spoil that for you.

I enjoyed it and it actually brought tears to my eyes at the end, something which the book certainly didn't do.

The girlfriend, who hasn't read the books, found it the least enjoyable of the series. She liked it, but thought it was too slow in the middle.

As George said, that was a problem in the book as well.

I do think it was slightly unbalanced.

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW:

MAJOR SPOILERS:

Seemed strange to me to have Madeye's death off-screen, then spend so much time in the meandering middle.

MAyb they were worried that having an explosive opening would result in an anti-climax at the end, but I would have preferred to see more of the full on battle at the beginning and less of the introspective stuff.

Decent enough though.

I enjoyed the book and the movie, and was pleasantly surprised by how much they were able to stay true to the book - only removing characters or details that would have distracted too much from an already dense amount of information/character/plot.

SPOLER ALERTS:

I'll have to go back and flip through the book because I think the ended on a note that appears later in the book, leaving me to wonder just how they might spend 2 and a half hours on the finale, unless they take their time with things like Snape's memories and what have you.

Still, it was fine.  I enjoyed Hermoine's increased screen time.  I might have enjoyed it more if reading the book wasn't already a lot like reading the shooting script, or if they had done more to reveal the terror encompassing the world after the Ministry falls.

And I agree with others - a failure of the book and the movie (so far) is a lack of truly unifying theme.  At least with the book, there was the whole mistrust of Dumbledore while they figured out the Deathly Hallows and how they might relate to Voldemort.

But I've commented on other sites in regards to the Harry Potter saga that a lot of the complaints about the movies are, really, just complaints about the books, for the plots and characters are substantially, if not completely, of Rowling's creation.

Overall, though, nothing in the film changed my favorable opinion about the series.  Looking forward to the finale.