Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (SPOILER INSIDE starting on page 3)

[Margalis]

You have to admit that she wrote one hell of a compelling series, the likes of which haven't been seen in children's literature since arguably The Chronicles of Narnia.

I do? No, I don't have to admit that.

She wrote the equivalent of McDonalds. McDonalds sells a lot of food, and also sucks shit - there is no contradiction there. Harry Potter is another Star Wars, a series that has no depth or interesting ideas but engages people at a childish level. Sometimes instead of living in an adult world and grappling with adult ideas it's easier just to indulge in things that pander to the lizard part of your brain.

[Tale]

I wouldn't put it anywhere near Narnia either. Rowling has more in common with Enid Blyton than CS Lewis, but that's still not a bad thing.

[cmlancas]

I didn't say it was critically amazing. Rather, I said it was compelling. People read it. It is compelling. McDonalds' fries are compelling -- people eat them.

 

[pxib]

McDonalds' fries are compelling -- people eat them.

If I had a sig I'd sig that.

[Ironwood]

You are aware that's possible, right ?

[eldaec]

You are aware that's possible, right ?

What? You mean I don't have to type this out each time?

Zounds!

Well I'm going to anyway because I'm old skool.

[Ironwood]

I apologise for not ruling out the fact that a fellow poster may in fact be a complete and utter dumbass.

[Venkman]

Just finished the book as well. I completely agree with almost everyone here on it. However, the ending didn't piss me off as much as I thought it would. Based on this thread, I was expecting a WTFSeinfeld ending. But really, the whole book sets it up well ahead of time. As some have said here, this one truly is closure. It's done, fin, no more. Maybe she'll license out the intervening 19 years, to define what Harry has become, what George has become, how kids are sorted these days, why they're still sorted at all beyond inertial tradition, and so on. But in setting up this dead-end finale, she has also given the reader little reason to care.

That seems to be what she wanted. She is done with Harry Potter so wanted to try and set it up so that the readers were done too. "Stop bothering me! We're out."

I didn't like the amount of death. By the time Fred died, it was like, oh, yea, another death. That was the closest she seemed willing to come to killing an A-list character. I really did think Neville was going to be the one to bite it. I never ever thought she'd actually kill off Harry, Ron, or Hermione. She set those three up like the main trio of Wheel of Time. They are all critical to the outcome.

The other thing that bothered me as it did others here is that almost none of the characters ever evolved at all. The main three were always the way they were. Harry was always willy-nilly until some decisive/luck victory. Hermione was always the best witch evar!11 Ron was alway there for the ride, a way into the world/lives of a wizarding family.

I'd say the only character that actually evolved was Dumbledore, but that, like Snape, was more flashback definition than anything having to do with a character actually growing up throughout the series.

The Battle of Hogwarts is going to make for some good cinema though.

And I can see whoever does the movie nicking the entire Epilogue ala Jackson not bothering with that whole liberating-the-Shire thing.

[Riggswolfe]

I didn't like the amount of death. By the time Fred died, it was like, oh, yea, another death. That was the closest she seemed willing to come to killing an A-list character. I really did think Neville was going to be the one to bite it. I never ever thought she'd actually kill off Harry, Ron, or Hermione. She set those three up like the main trio of Wheel of Time. They are all critical to the outcome.

Fred's death was the one that really moved me. I figured Hagrid and Ron were dead men going into the book for some reason.

The other thing that bothered me as it did others here is that almost none of the characters ever evolved at all. The main three were always the way they were. Harry was always willy-nilly until some decisive/luck victory. Hermione was always the best witch evar!11 Ron was alway there for the ride, a way into the world/lives of a wizarding family.

Draco's family evolved some in that they went from "Kill all muggles" to "we care about each other more than this war." I kept hoping that Draco would evolve a little more than he did though.

And I can see whoever does the movie nicking the entire Epilogue ala Jackson not bothering with that whole liberating-the-Shire thing.

That BTW is the only place where I felt that Peter Jackson fucked up. That and leaving the Galadriel gift giving scene out of the theatrical version of Fellowship. But really, retaking the Shire is critical to show how the hobbits have changed and grown.

[Venkman]

Good point on the Malfoys. I actually started feeling bad for them in the end, particularly when Narcissa covered for Harry having been "resurrected".

I also felt a bit jipped by the final Harry/Voldemort encounter. One spell to end it all after 3 pages of speech? Sure it made sense in the context, but I wanted another Dumbledor/Voldemort fight.

Now, onto LoTR :)

I agree that the Shire events were critical to showing how the hobbits had evolved in the story. They can no longer afford to be passive isolationists as a race. They realized they were in fact a part of the larger world, and needed to truck with it.

However, their entire culture was delivered in the movie simply as a few minutes of voiceover from Bilbo. In the cumulative hours of all three flicks, there was negible time given to setting up the hobbits as anything more than "here's another race to show diversity in the world". Further, the only one of the main four that evolved at all was Frodo, maybe Sam becoming a bit more courageous. They were really just like most of the other characters, part-players for the larger advancing storyline of kicking Sauron out of Middle Earth for good.

So in the context of the movie itself, I was fine with the entirety of the Hobbit evolution being shown in Sam finally talking to and marrying Rosie and Frodo getting on the boat to Grey Havens.

[Samwise]

Further, the only one of the main four that evolved at all was Frodo, maybe Sam becoming a bit more courageous.

Truth.  The Scouring makes more sense in the context of Pippin and Merry having become sworn-in Lord Defenders of Rohan/Gondor or whatever their titles were at that point.  They never really got to that point in the movies.

I would still have rather had the Scouring in there than not, though.  Even if it ended up adding some length to the movie, it would have made it feel shorter, because there would have been something interesting in there instead of twenty minutes of tearful goodbyes.

[Venkman]

Yea, no doubt. It's a Hollywood conundrum though. How do you make Scouring/Liberation more exciting of an ending that killing Sauron and watching Barad Dur fall? :) After that, liberating the Shire would looke like an assault on Ewok village.

[Samwise]

TBH I think the Scouring would be more exciting on screen than the fall of Barad Dur was.  Epic hobbit melee vs. a big rock with a neon eye on it falling over.  Hobbit melee, please.

[HaemishM]

an assault on Ewok village.

That most certainly would have improved Return of the Jedi.

[Lantyssa]

Further, the only one of the main four that evolved at all was Frodo, maybe Sam becoming a bit more courageous.

Odd.  I felt like Frodo was the only one who didn't evolve.

[Ironwood]

What ?  You felt the playful capering Hobbit that Welcomed Gandalf in the first five minutes didn't change ?

Seriously ?

[Lantyssa]

Going crazy under the influence of a ring that controls the souls of anyone near it doesn't really fall under "growth" in my dictionary.  Too much of an external force, which provided for may ten minutes of screen time where we could see him without that influence.

[Furiously]

Going crazy under the influence of a ring that controls the souls of anyone near it doesn't really fall under "growth" in my dictionary.  Too much of an external force, which provided for may ten minutes of screen time where we could see him without that influence.

How did he look at the end? I seem to recall him being tired looking and wanting to go off to join the elves fleeing middle earth.

[Venkman]

I agree. The Ring affecting him didn't make him evolve as a person/character. It was his pinnacle involvement in very worldly events that did. To me, he embodied the entire evolution of insular Hobbit to worldly one. He's got the ear of the Kings of Gondor and Rohan. The most celebrated Hobbit before him merely gets strange visitations from Dwarves. And even Bilbo actually did move back home. So he left, wierd for a Hobbit, but moved back home and re-integrated, becoming a "normal" Hobbit as an extension of a "don't bother me with the world" culture. Frodo never did that. He came back, squared his affairs, and left (in the movie. He was home for much longer in the books, but never re-integrated there either).

Oh, and something else that did piss me off from the Harry Potter book: the Horcrux making him abnormally angry, private and less effective at fighting evil? Come on. Just remembered this part in the context of takling about the One Ring...

[Samwise]

If I can veer back to Potter for a second:

The Battle of Hogwarts is going to make for some good cinema though.

Not if they cut it down as much as they cut down the potentially-cinematically-awesome-but-ultimately-disappointing Weasley rebellion in OotP.  It went from this awesome campaign of magical guerilla prank warfare (Fred and George's finest moment in the entire series) to a lame fireworks show.  If they give the same treatment to the Battle of Hogwarts it'll be cut down to a single shot of the armor walking around, a cut away to some lame dialogue, and a cut back to show half the cast lying dead on the floor.

[NowhereMan]

Cutting the Weaseley rebellion was probably the single most disappointing thing about the last Potter film. That said it would be tricky to find a director capable of walking and breathing simultaneously that would cut down the battle of Hogwarts, especially in favour of lots of camping in the woods. Unless they really are retarded and eschew big battle in favour of clumsy romance.

I quite enjoyed the book but I'd also read it and the previous two in fairly quick succession (I read HBP right before it and OotP a couple of weeks previously) so the plot threads were all fresh and I wasn't really treating it as self-contained at all. I think that helped quite a bit as frankly it followed on so immediately that it really felt more like a continuation than some of the others. The camping stuff was overdone and dragged quite a bit, I could see Rowling was trying to establish the characters more, to show some sort of maturation under stress. While I think there's a definite difference between the three of them from the first book to the end, it doesn't really strike me as any kind of maturation more a solidifying of what they were before with a dash of falling in love with others. Ron and Hermione' romance hardly struck me as one of the great love stories of our age but then that would have been far less believable considering the characters and the fact that they're 17.

Probably the worst bit of the book for me was the Gringotts break in. The fact that the Goblin seemed unprepared for some of the traps they got hit with struck me as unlikely and the casual response to the losing the sword of Gryffindor also irked me. Never once do they suggest trying to get it back (as far as I recall), they just stoically accept that it's gone and try to figure out some other way of destroying the Horcruxes. The deaths in the battle struck me more as Rowling trying to show some level of the reality of war. As much as killing off 6 or 7 known characters reduced their impact, simply telling us the floor was littered with corpses doesn't have a huge impact. Kill of a character that people know brings it home a bit more and if she really had given us a decent death scene for all of them Harry would have had to have been at pretty much every part of the battle and it would have probably been another hundred pages. I can see that it wasn't done perfectly but I'm not exactly unhappy with her for it.