What was the Resurrection Stone in the Snitch all about?
Harry comes to grip with all the death in his life. Says goodbye to Mom and Pop, and all the folks who befriended, helped, and died defending him. When I first read the books, I thought it was the thing he would use to come back to life, after V killed him, but they didn’t do it that way in the book or movie.
Lots, apparently. My 13 yr old daughter, the house expert on all things Potter, regaled my wife for over 20 minutes about all the sub plots and various threads that were dropped. She thought it should have been a three part movie!
Just saw it this afternoon. I had a great time… really loved the whole series.
I took the Snape/patronus thing to mean that he never stopped loving Potter’s mom despite their growing apart and Lily Potter having married another man.
I haven’t read any of the books, which based upon the reaction of readers, is the right way to experience the Potter series. Watch the movies, enjoy them, and then get a much richer (although probably more boring at times) experience with the novels. I’m saving them for about another year to read together with my son.
Saw the movie today and really liked it, but I have to admit that a lot of stuff in the movies is confusing if you’re like me and forget little details from the books, like how Godric’s Sword can always be pulled from the Sorting Hat by a true Gryffindor. I had to look that up in the Harry Potter wiki when I got home, because I couldn’t figure out why it vanished from the dead goblin’s hand and then ended up with Neville.
I hadn’t read any of the books until after seeing movies 1-5 and I thought both the deaths of Cedric and Sirius were incredibly powerful without any knowledge of the source material.
The twin’s death definitely got shafted in the gravitas department. Who even died? Good thing I read the book.
The problem with multi part epic dramas is that they have far too many characters and the film makers have to trust the audience to get WTF is going on. I agree that it was hard to tell one of the twins died, but for every guy like us, there is someone like my daughter, who can rattle off every dropped sub plot and minor character arc that didn’t make the cut, even as the credits are rolling.
I thought the series worked really well in film and text, but the experience of reading the books is much different one from watching the movie.
I’m considering reading the books now that I’ve seen all the movies. I noticed one of the twins died, but have no idea which is which. Heck, I’m not sure I could name them both…one’s George, right? Is Fred the other one? I’m just not sure. I never developed an attachment to them.
I will admit, I also thought for a second that Snape was going to wind up being Harry’s father…that’s really the way it looked like that exposition was going. Did it come across like that in the book, where for a second you thought that was the point, or was the just a little sloppy on the part of the screenplay?
I haven’t seen part 2 yet, so I can’t opine on the movie side of things, but I don’t recall ever thinking that Snape was going to end up being Harry’s father. It has been a while, but I remember the whole Snape/Lilly thing being just a tad creepy and stalker/obsessive in the books. At least as I read them.
The twins weren’t ever given distinct personalities in the books either, to my memory.
Gred and Forge. Forge died.
I remember seeing one of the movies (Prisoner of Azkaban) years ago, before I had read any of the books. I liked the movie, but my wife left the theater complaining about details that were left out of the movie. Now that I’ve actually read the books and watched the movies over again, I feel like they always leave out some of the details that add flavor and depth to the storyline, but it’s a necessary evil with adapting a screenplay.
But with this movie, it just felt rushed. There were huge speeches and major plot points removed, but many of them were things that could have easily been fit in with everything else going on. Case in point: the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort. In the book, it’s a battle surrounded by onlookers, where Harry explains about the Elder Wand, and then offers Voldemort a chance at redemption. But in the movie, they battle in an empty courtyard, Harry hardly says anything, Voldemort doesn’t really have any moments of doubt or confusion, and it just…ends. It’s such a missed opportunity, I can’t believe they changed so much with the final movie. Even the resolution with the Elder Wand, which I thought was a nice touch in the book, was abbreviated and changed in the movie.
Say what you will about Lord of the Rings, but at least they knew how to end a damn series.
I think it was definitely a movie editing or translation error regarding the impression that Snape is Harry’s dad. I’ve actualy seen/heard quite a few people come to the same conclusion after watching part 2, so it’s not just a weird one-off. The bit with Snape whispering that Harry “must never know” seems to be the culprit. The way it’s presented in the movie, it’s easy to connect the wrong dots.
Also, they completely whitewashed how terribly Harry’s dad treated Snape in school. I thought it was a great dichotomy to see how much Snape hated Harry’s dad but loved Lily, and how he saw elements of each of them in Harry. But as it was presented in the film, it was very one-dimensional.
I also got the impression that Snape was Harry’s father for a bit.
The Snape/father sequence was something where I thought the movie might surprise me but didn’t. Just like how the movies lead you to believe Harry needs to die but you figure he’ll get out of it somehow. There’s only a brief spasm of concern about a twist – why haven’t I already been spoiled about this on the Internet? Then it’s back to normal.
To continue the train of a hundred people picking at the same things in a QT3 movie thread: the final fight was my biggest disappointment. The setup was there since you figured the elder wand would fail. But the execution was flat. Fantasy should be more epic and exciting than that.
For me, it was that line, plus the way Snape and Lily “connected” by the shore as he makes her feels special, plus the constant mistreatment by James (which makes sense in either context I guess), plus the matching Patronus…it seemed like there were a lot of dots that could be connected like that. Plus, I had no idea before this movie that he ever had a thing for Lily, so it was an awful lot to infer about the relationship from just one flashback.
I can see how you might think that having read the books. As someone who hasn’t (and therefore doesn’t know what’s dropped), I felt like the pacing was dead-on. I never felt like it was dragging, nor rushed, and I never had that “I’ve been sitting in this theater for two hours, isn’t it almost OVER YET” feeling that I’ve so so often lately, including Deathly Hallows Part 1.
Agreed. That’s a pretty big moment for Harry on his journey to adulthood. He finds out that his dad and Sirius were likely bullies (or at least percieved as bullies by Snape) and he begins to see that not everything is black or white. They really do gloss it over in the movie series. I think you see the one memory of Harry’s dad levitating Snape or something during his training, but it’s immediately off-set with Snape bullying Harry.
I didn’t expect the movies to be as emotionally complicated as the books. When it came down to cutting a dialogue scene or an action scene, I’m pretty sure I know which way WB felt about it.
Interesting. But I don’t think the last 45 minutes of a movie is enough time for that kind of shift to sink in. Maybe if they put it in part 1 or made it a common theme throughout the series (like Harry forgiving Draco all the time).