srah blah blah

There were several scenes from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that I was most looking forward to seeing adapted for the big screen. These were:

1. The Ron/Hermione kiss
2. Neville kills Nagini
3. The Prince's Tale
4. Neville's gran is proud of him
5. The return of Percy and death of Fred
6. "Not my daughter, you bitch!"
7. The Epilogue

I went into the film expecting changes and also knowing that generally, these films have been well-adapted, simplifying things and cutting out parts of the story that aren't essential to the plot. But I also thought that one of the reasons Deathly Hallows was split into two movies was to be able to retain more of the book, and that's why I was so disappointed that so many of my favorite scenes were changed or missing.

The Ron/Hermione kiss
I didn't see it coming, then and there, because I was expecting it to happen later. It was pretty adorable, and I can see why they made the change, because Hermione's S.P.E.W. efforts were never really a focus in the movies as they were in the books. I think I'm disappointed because it came off more as "two horny teenagers escape death and make out" than "Hermione sees that Ron has finally learned to appreciate elf welfare as she does, and launches herself at him".

Neville kills Nagini
This scene was so dramatic and cinematic in the book that it never occurred to me that they would change it. After the movie ended, I acted out the book scene for my friends in a way that I wish I could recreate, record on video and show you, except that it would absolutely guarantee that I would be the next Star Wars Kid. I was way too into it.

Anyway, the Sword of Gryffindor is supposed to present itself to any worthy Gryffindor who needs it. So in the movie, Neville pulls the sword out of the hat, gives a rousing speech (which was well done and made me cry), wanders back to the castle, takes a nap, remembers that he has the sword, goes for a walk (a limp?), and runs into a snake that he kills. It's much more dramatic for the sword to present itself at exactly the moment it's needed, as in the book, than for the sword to effectively say, "Hey Neville, thought you might need me at some point, so I'll just follow you around for a while until you do." The only tension that this scene created in the movie was my concern that someone else was going to kill Nagini and that the writers had stolen that triumph from Neville.

The Prince's Tale
I thought this was mostly well done, but since when are our memories stored in tears? Does that make any sense? You would go see The Notebook and forget where you lived!¹

Neville's gran is proud of him
Like the Ron/Hermione kiss, I should have realized that this was too dependent on things that had been cut out of previous movies (especially the "Christmas on the Closed Ward" scenes of Order of the Phoenix) and was therefore not going to make it into the film. It's a shame we didn't get to see more of Neville's family and home life.

The return of Percy and death of Fred
It felt disrespectful to Fred that we saw him dead but not dying. They couldn't spare a few seconds to show him reuniting with Percy, fighting alongside him and laughing as he died?

"Not my daughter, you bitch!"
This was the only one of the few scenes that I was most looking forward to that didn't disappoint.

The Epilogue
I really wanted to see how they aged the actors and to see the kids they got to play the next generation. I was pleased with that, but without the "all was well", it made the ending seem kind of anticlimactic and even more like tacked-on fan-candy than the book's epilogue did.

Other quibbles:

• I didn't like that McGonagall didn't evacuate the little firsties and that she sent Slytherins to the dungeon. We all know that there are a lot of slimeballs in Slytherin, but being locked up because of the house you were sorted into is not the Hogwarts Way.
• WHAT THE HELL was that Neville/Luna subplot about? Was J.K. Rowling even consulted on this movie? Why would she let that happen? This may have made me the maddest of anything else in the movie because it was directly in conflict with what J.K. Rowling has told us before. I guess Neville and Luna could have had a flirtation at school before growing up and marrying other people, but why? Why was it necessary? Does war just make people pair up unnaturally? (I may be extra sensitive to this because I was recently reminded of my long-standing, irrational, fan-fiction-influenced conviction that if Luna's going to be with anyone other than Rolf Scamander - her Rowling-mandated future husband, whoever he is - it should be George. George. GEORGE!)

I sound really negative, but the fact is that many other scenes, the ones I wasn't as excited about going into the film, were quite well done. I'm going to see it again tomorrow to see if watching it again will improve my attitude. Maybe once I know what's coming up in individual scenes, I'll be able to appreciate it more as a whole. For now, I'm kind of lonely, because I feel like I'm the only person who didn't 100% love every minute, and that's particularly sad because there isn't any more! So I had better start loving it tomorrow! After tomorrow's viewing, I'll write another post about everything I did like.