Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

So I'd managed to have some non-BabyL time last weekend, and without Hubby. Hubby stayed at home to take care of BabyL (and did a spendid job), while I went with a a friend to watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

My friend whom I went with only read the first book and watched the first movie, so she really has no idea as to what was going to happen. I did encourage her to read the synopsis of all the books, but I think she'd only gotten through the synopsis for this movie and that was about it: she was watching this movie more or less blind. From that point of view, she did say that the movie was enjoyable and she was able to more or less follow the plot.

I have some major quibbles myself about the movie:

• Other than reveling who the Half-Blood Prince was, there was no other explanation as to why this person was the Half-Blood Prince, and more importantly, the significance of it
• The girl who played Lavender Brown over-acted
• Although they included the big scene near the end of the book about finding the third Horcrux, I felt that the significance of Horcruxes themselves were kind of glossed over in the movie -- trust me when I say Horcruxes are much more significant than you realise (if you haven't read the books)
  
• I still feel that they didn't emphasize that Snape was very reluctant to kill Dumbledore
• There was a lot of other significant detail in Book 6 that is very important in Book 7 that they completely left out.

Having said that, I still enjoyed the movie for what it was. Book 6 gets darker still and the overall mood of the movie reflected that. To be fair to the movie producers, I felt that Book 6 was overly long and that J.K Rowling didn't have to put in a big epic scene of Harry and Dumbledore looking for the third Horcrux in the book. Of course, at the end of this movie, it was clearly set up for the next two and final movies in the series.

I feel what will happen for Movie 7a is that a lot of the significant detail that was missing from the previous movies will be added and fleshed out. And Movie 7b will pretty much be the fight to the finish. I think it was a good decision on Paramount's part to split the last book into two movies because of the tremendous amount of detail that shows up in the book. Not only will this finally satisfy the book lovers, but Paramount will milk this francise for what it's worth (no cynasim, really!)

I give this 3.5 out of 5.