I know.  It’s a movie.  But I defend this movie review as it’s based on a book.  A book that I’ve read in fact.

I went to see the new Harry Potter movie yesterday.  Yes, I’m going to give my opinion, because it is based on a book, so it counts. Trust me.

My thoughts go like this.

If you’ve never read the book, this movie was fantastic.  If you’ve read the book and are under 18 years of age, Harry  (and even Ron) are getting pretty hot, so the movie was wonderful.  If you’re over 18 and have read the book you, like me, might be feeling that the movie lacked some very important information.

I realize that there is no way you can make a movie based on a book that totally lives up to the written word on the screen. Unless of course you’re Peter Jackson and the book was The Lord of the Rings.  But I left the movie theatre wondering just how they were going to transition into Movie #7, since they omitted something I feel is pretty important.  **Note, items mentioned below could be considered a spoiler if you’ve not read the final book in the Harry Potter series, proceed at your own risk**

You see, in Book 6 Harry painstakingly works his way through Tom Riddle’s (aka Voldemort, aka He Who Must Not be Named) life through experiencing other people’s memories of him via the Pensieve.  This of course lays the groundwork for helping Harry determine what items Voldemort used as Horcruxes in the 7th book.  Since the movie only shows Harry experiencing two such memories, and does nothing to imply or explain that Harry has in fact experienced many such memories, the movie leaves one wondering how Harry is ever going to figure out what items might be housing pieces of Voldemorts soul and not to mention how to find them.

I also had issue with the Dumbledore death scene as in the movie Harry simply watches as Dumbledore is murdered, apparently simply because the Headmaster told him to.  In the book however, it is quite different.  First, Harry is invisible, having donned the invisibility cloak and second, Dumbledore immobilizes Harry so that he can not come to the Headmaster’s defense.  The scene of Harry hiding below watching the scene transpire simply does not fit with the impulsive, brave to a fault young wizard who we’ve come to know in the books.  And again, things that come to light in Book 7  are supported by the events of this particular scene.

There was much that I loved in The Half Blood Prince  that didn’t make it to the silver screen.  The budding romance between Tonks and Remus (we do hear her call him sweetheart at the Weasley’s at Christmas however.)  And the beautifully sad memorial service for Dumbledore at the end of the book are a couple I can think of immediately.  But those small subplots are an understandable deletion.

The Pensieve memories and Dumbledore’s death scene however, in my opinion, were items that should have been represented the way they were written in the book.  And it was those two items that caused me to leave the movie theatre just a tiny bit disappointed in the movie.