my wife enjoyed the epilogue purely for the way the main characters were made up, saying harry never looked handsomer.
he kinda reminded me of bill bixby, the original magician (everyone before him were either martians or genies.)
Saw it Sunday and my thoughts echo a lot of others’s.
Definitely cried buckets at Snape’s final scene; that was my favorite chapter of the whole series and it played out a lot how my imagination did. I thought they toned down the final part where he talks with the dead more than I wanted…but nothing too terrible.
Completely killing Dumbledore’s past changes his character entirely. The “only saw the movies” Dumbledore is A LOT different than the “read the books too” Dumbledore; nothing too terrible again but something worth noting.
My biggest complaint is that I think they sacrificed too much of the grand spectacle that was the battle for more focus on the small stuff. I wanted to see the professors fighting, I wanted to see Grawp taking on a giant, I wanted to see the minor characters (Dean Thomas, Patil Twins, etc.) actually engaged in battle. Instead we got 20 minutes of Ron and Hermione vs. a snake.
Hated Neville’s speech. The book’s was better and I think he acted it out teeeerrrrrrribly.
I thought it was kinda weird that Harry’s son looks like 13 or 14 - they’d just shown a quick clip of tiny little Harry back when he was 11, and he looked all of, well, 10 or 11. His son Albus, going to Hogwarts as a first year (but I don’t know if that’s made clear in the movie; it is in the book) looked way older.
But that’s a nitpick, I guess.
Harry was a neglected and underfed 11 when he was a first-year. That could make a difference.
And I believe Radcliffe was actually 10 when he started.
The whole look and feel of the movies changed for Prisoner of Azkaban. IIRC they changed directors. IIRC the change from I to II was minor if any, possibly setting Hagrid’s cottage back towards the woods more so he was closer to the spiders and such. Big look and feel change for III, especially the Whomping Willow. Also the look of the area around Hagrid’s cottage, and distance from the main school. Plus the interiors look different, like the tower. That look and feel was maintained through the rest of the movies, despite another director change.
Not at all.
That was straight from the books. Well, with minor editing to remove the bits about Harry’s godson.
Disagree. The whole point was to close the loop, the symmetry of Harry’s and Ron and Hermione’s kids going off to Hogwarts for the first time. The trepidation of Harry’s son mimicking Harry’s first encounter with the train station and the pensiveness over the Sorting Hat and which house he’d end up in. Also, the symbology of Harry having the family, and being there for his son the way no one was for him. It’s a wonderful wrap up.
Nice!
What makes you think that? I didn’t notice anything wrong.
I just saw it (IMAX 3D - the 3D was serviceable as it usually is, and I stopped noticing it much after halfway through like usual, and also as is usual for post-process 3D, eye sockets were bizarrely mutated). I’ve followed some of the thread but I’m not going to memorize it before posting. General thoughts:
It started out a little clunky but got more streamlined as it went on.
The score was haunting (and also familiar - what other movie am I thinking of that had a similar melody?)
Most of the important moments were done fairly well. “Not my daughter”, etc.
Hermione and Ron barely existed. Yes, they had Hermione have the dragon idea (good choice), and they had them with the chamber of secrets mission, and a big kiss. But despite that, they seemed like secondary characters most of the movie.
How did Luna end up at Hogwarts??? That really took me out of the movie. She was left behind, but then when they get to Hogwarts suddenly she’s there, when they had to sneak in. I’m guessing she couldn’t just enroll since she had been in prison!! How did this happen in the books?
I was disappointed that they used Harry as a Horcrux-dar. Although this made sense, I still missed mention of Voldemort using house symbolic items. it would have been simple to say “that cup was the Hufflepuff cup! Maybe we need a Ravenclaw Diadem too!”.
No Dumbledore history? It was almost not worth what they bothered to give us in terms of his brother and sister. And I had hoped that the movie would be a bit braver with his relationship with Grindelwald. But even if they didn’t want to cover the gay stuff, it would have been nice to know how Dumbledore defeated him when he had the undefeatable wand.
Voldemort’s death - apparently he was made of paper, because when he dies it produced tons of bits of floating burned paper. I would have preferred some other method. Certainly the King’s Cross abortion was sufficiently bloody.
Speaking of which, why wasn’t Harry naked in the afterlife? It’s not like they couldn’t have kept his naughty bits out of frame.
The actor who played Albus (Arthur Bowen) was 10 when filming started and just 12 when it completed (June of last year).
hmmm… have to go back to DH for that. i can’t remember anymore who left shell cottage first: harry and company or luna. i know ollivander even made luna a wand after their escape. with a wand, luna could have made her way home and then to hogwarts or, she was accompanied by spouses bill and fleur weasley in time for the battle.
much of this should have been covered in HBP movie.
a non-wand-bearing fight?
they must have gotten the inspiration from “the corpse bride” but they used paper instead of butterflies.
because harry wasn’t sure he was really dead.
^^ In the books, Harry wasn’t wearing clothes in the afterlife until he wished that he was wearing them. Also, in one magazine article written long before the movie came out, they did say that there would be a nude-Harry scene
Did anyone else notice that George had both ears in the movie? Neither ear looked at all damaged, either. Sure, they do have magic for healing and that kind of thing, but in the books it was mentioned that they couldn’t replace George’s ear. Maybe they changed it for the movie.
Maybe that was Fred you were looking at? 
I guess all you have to do to become an adult is to comb your hair.
Since we’ve never seen Ron in that state, I did a double-take.
The “grownup versions” did well – the hair, the clothes, but they nailed the portrayal of their older selves with a little trick I call acting.
Seriously, Harry looked like he’s been through a lot raising a kid, but proud of how it turned out. Ginny had a bit of Soccer Mom going on. They done good.
I was dreaded the potential treacle of this scene, but it turned out well.
And, for you cynical haters out there: after all that those characters survived over 7 books, they deserved a happy ending.
Nitpick: Quidditch mom.
I was listening to Half-Blood Prince today in the car, the scene where Tom Riddle is visiting Hepzibah Smith and learning about Hufflepuff’s cup and Slytherin’s locket. Smith tells Riddle that both of them are supposed to have powerful magical powers, but she’s never bothered to investigate them.
Wouldn’t it be marvelously, deliciously ironic if, say, Hufflepuff’s cup would keep you alive forever if you drank from it every day?
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Did anyone else notice that George had both ears in the movie?
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There is a scene with the two of them side by side, and one of them’s ear is a little mangled. It’s not completely gone, but a bit ruffled around the bottom. I think you just missed it.
Something I read about another movie just now reminds me of something that bothered me…
Can someone explain to me why people throughout the series have told blue-eyed Harry that he has “your mother’s eyes” repeatedly, but the actress they cast for young Lily has dark brown eyes? It’s not like they used contacts in the movie, either, since her being brown-eyed was the first thing I noticed in the flashback. When you say someone has so and so’s eyes, you generally mean the same color, don’t you?
Could be more of how the eyes are shaped, but I would generally think eye color first.
Definitely in the books, both Lily’s and Harry’s eyes are green.
I assume that the movies just figured people wouldn’t be staring at the actors’ eyes all that closely.
Also the green contacts irritated Radcliffe’s eyes, and I don’t mean mildly. He did one scene with them (train station at the end of the first film) and never again.
Yeah, I never notice eye color, on screen or in real life, unless someone makes me look.
I’m surprised they did not digitally change the Mom’s eyes to match Radcliffe. Never noticed, though.
Or, for that matter, give the actress who played Lily Potter contacts to match the color of Daniel Radcliffe’s eyes. She had way less screen time than he; once they decided against giving him the green eyes that the book mentioned, it would have been fairly easy to give her his eyes, so to speak.