harry potter deathly hallows part 1 review

Harry, Hermione and Ron, personable as they may be, and the bickering adolescent interplay between them, are not sufficiently interesting to hold our attention. In the absence of the eccentric, outlandish staff of Hogwarts and Voldemort's wicked crew, the film becomes a rather pale affair. There, they take over the identities of three everyday adults in a manner that closely resembles certain sequences of Christopher Nolan's Inception. Most particularly, they enter the normal world of the Muggles, now dominated by agents of Evil and resembling a cross between Lang's Metropolis and Dickens's London. But from time to time, they transport themselves elsewhere. Most of the time, the kids are in the wilderness, a dark, wintry place either on the Pembrokeshire coast or in the Highlands. After this, Harry, Hermione and Ron are on their own working out how to find the Arthurian sword (predictably lying at the bottom of a frozen lake) that will enable them to vanquish the Horcruxes, Voldemort's airborne cohorts.

The forces of evil, with Ralph Fiennes's Voldemort in the chair, gather to decide who'll kill Potter, while the forces of good assemble at Potter's suburban home to plan his rescue and transfer to a safe house. Dumbledore is dead and most of the adults make only token appearances, the chief exception being Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange. Now a decade in the telling, the Potter saga is getting a trifle thin, while its heroic trio are developing bags under their eyes and behave like schoolchildren wondering whether they should spend their gap year chasing dragons or hunting for the Holy Grail. These gifts will assist them in their imminent apocalyptic encounter with the evil Lord Voldemort that will settle the future of mankind. Not long after, he's presenting the orphaned messiah Harry Potter and his two wizardly chums, the upper-middle-class Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and the lower-middle-class Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), with mysterious inheritances from Dumbledore, their mentor and former headmaster at Hogwarts School for Wizardry. Penumbrously lit by Portuguese-born French cinematographer Eduardo Serra, the latest and penultimate film in the Harry Potter cycle (in fact the first half of JK Rowling's final book) begins with an ominous, Sergio Leone-style close-up of Bill Nighy telling us: 'These are dark times.' He sounds like any member of the coalition cabinet at the dispatch box, but he is, in fact, Rufus Scrimgeour, minister of magic. But more recently in popular culture, and especially in the movies, it's come to mean deep, serious, mature, dangerous and altogether more truthful, more worthy of intelligent consideration than anything categorised as 'light' and thus frivolous and deceptive.

The adjective 'dark' has always suggested something sinister, often associated with the Prince of Darkness.

Harry potter deathly hallows part 1 review