The Redundancy in the Deathly Hallows Film

In any film adaptation of any well-known novel, there is always the issue of pleasing the existing fans who are familiar with the books, and the mainstream film-going audience. Usually, it is difficult to do one or the either - the written form lends itself to more description and backstory than the impatient movie-goer would like.

Usually, movies are at most two or three hours in length, any longer and the clueless audience will be bored out of their minds. Even an audio book reading would take twice as long though. Hence, it is safe to assume that to reach a good compromise, producers would not convert into live-action all the scenes depicted in the book, but only save the important, key scenes to please the excited fans who were dying for years to watch an adaptation of their favourite book, and the uninitiated who just want to watch a movie. Unfortunately, in the interest of commercialisation and box office mainstream appeal, often, the hardcore fans do not get what they want for their views of what the movie should have often differs from that of the creative team making the movie.

It is logical to think thence, if a movie would be split into two full-length parts, as has been done with the subject of our article - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, there would be more opportunity to film the scenes the fans want to see, more creative space unconstrained by shorter time limits. Assuming the individual acting was not an issue, I would have thought that the final book in the series would be one of the best movie adaptations ever hence with all the plotlines properly developed. Unfortunately, an excellent chance like that has been marred by absolutely redundant scenes put in the Part One of the theatrical release.

Yes! The scenes when Harry seemed to be courting Hermione inside their enchanted tent with their awkward dancing, or when Ron seems to be tempted to turn against Harry with the vision of the latter and Hermione making out. Perhaps if this was a true original movie, these would have been, although hackneyed, still sensible things to put in. However, maybe about half of us the population who have watched the movie also have read the book - and during these redundant romance screens we are just bored out and go like "get on with it", because we already know that Harry is not marrying Hermione ultimately. Unless this adaptation tries to be surprisingly original and change the ending i.e. like Harry really marries Hermonie, in Part Two, I am going to stand by my opinion that these afore-mentioned scenes were, redundant and pointless.

Certainly, such scenes with no parallel in the book are there to appeal to the mainstream crowd valuing romance and sex. However, they have no clear place in an adaptation. The time spent in the film covering these scenes could have been better used to portray other parts of the book better e.g. Kreacher's story about Regulus and his betrayal and a million other small things that make the world more magical like the enchanted portrait of Phineas Black.

Nevertheless, it is not that the whole movie is rotten. I quite liked the animated telling of the tale of the Deathly Hallows; the execution of whatever they had conceived to shoot all was at least decent if not good. My issue is with whatever they had conceived to shoot not.

To be honest, Harry Potter is a long series to adapt for the big screen with seven instalments. Nowadays I feel like I am watching it just so "to finish" to achieve some sort of closure since I've already read all the books and seen all the films thus far.

Hopefully, Part Two will not waste time with all these redundancies when it comes out July this year, and focus more on the plot and details J.K. Rowling originally had. Some things may be draggy to tell on film, or slightly changed with artistic license, but I do hope David Yates will give us book fans something worthy to remember the series by still - we want a Return of the King, not a Queen of the Damned. :)