As a non-fan, I found myself carrying out a thought experiment: what if you had never seen any of the previous films and knew little or nothing about them? Might you not be intrigued by the bizarre story of three teenagers, precariously possessed of magical powers, suddenly disappearing and reappearing in different landscapes, who are making a desperate attempt at survival, and who are anxiously coming to terms with the status rivalry and sexual tension between them? The answer is yes, sort of. There are some impenetrable plot quirks, and it carries the usual mythical baggage, but more nimbly than usual. It saves it, just a little, from the feeling of deja vu.ĭH1, as no one with the smallest self-respect is calling it, is still weighed down with the usual fidelity to the fanbase. Just by not imposing on the viewer the endless routine of coming back for a new term, witnessing those cute moving portraits in the wood panelling and encountering one new British character actor in the gallery of familiar British character actors on the teaching staff – all of which had become a tiring tradition in the opening 20 minutes of a Harry Potter film – this one can breathe more easily. Simply by not being set in Hogwarts, this movie feels looser, freer. The Harry Potter brand was evidently set to run a grim headless-chicken marathon right through its two remaining films to the bitter end.īut it has to be said that now there are weird and, for me, rather unexpected signs of life. The chief symptom is a mythically elaborate, spectacular, apocalyptic and fantastically dull confrontation between good and evil, about whose representatives there is nothing substantial left to learn. This is suffered by films that owe their existence purely to a marketing franchise momentum that has long since outlived the original creative excitement. At the end of the last Harry Potter film, this series began to succumb to a bad case of what the industry calls the "Matrix Revolutions".
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