Re: Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince discussion...
I apologize in advance if this turns into a rant, but I've been worrying about these issues for a while now and this me trying to come to grips with them.
One of the biggest worries I have of the films is how they portray Snape. He's a very important character and yet I don't think they've done enough to set him up in the films. In the books, we know by the end of GOF that he'll be using his old connections to the Death Eaters to infiltrate them and act as a double agent of Dumbledore's behalf. This is probably the crux of HBP - the mystery of is he or isn't he?
In the film of GOF, it's implied that Snape was chummy with Death Eaters (the scene where Harry sees him arguing with Karkaroff). In OOTP, there's a brief scene where we find out that Snape is part of the Order. And that's essentially the extent that the audience knows about what he's up to. His whole storyline has been poorly handled. Unless they do some major exposition, they could potentially ignore his capacity as a double agent and that he was once a Death Eater - the very things which cast his allegiance in doubt. So far, aside from his loathing of Harry, there's no reason to doubt that he's good.
This all leads me to another big plotpoint in HBP that I hope makes it in...
Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)...when Harry learns that it was Snape that overheard the prophecy, reported it to Voldemort, and thus caused the death of Harry's parents. It's a pretty big whopper. And I hope they do include it as well as the scene(s) where Harry debates Snape's allegiance with Dumbledore.
But wait a minute! They never mentioned anything about the circumstances regarding the Prophecy in OOTP. So how would they even begin to broach the subject in this movie? Ugh. Not only did leaving out that scene with Dumbledore in OOTP contribute to that film's failed resolution, it'll probably hinder this movie as well (more on that later).
These early reviews seem to indicate that the mystery of the Half Blood Prince is barely important to the movie and its resolution is sort of done as an aside rather than a big reveal. Not only that, Snape apparently has very little to do in this one and his big moments toward the end of the book have been turned into relative non-moments. For those who've read the Deathly Hallows, Snape is very important to that book but also has very little face time.
So they've generally ignored some of the most fascinating things about Snape so far (and likely will continue to do so) and have apparently thrown much of his story in this film to the background. So how do they hope to tackle his role in DH, where he actually has relatively little to do? There's another HUGE part of Snape's story that'll crop up in DH, which runs the risk of seeming out of the blue since they fumbled they're chance to introduce it in the last film. But I don't
really fault them since it may have seemed unimportant to the filmmakers at the time.
Also - since POA, the lack of resolution (as in the big expository scene towards the end) has, I felt, hindered the movies. Sure, they're still fun, but they can never be independent of the books because they lack the necessary resolution to be a complete experience. I like how the first two movies worked as mysteries. Clues are sprinkled throughout, and through the course of the movie, the pieces of the puzzle come together. But since POA, the clues and questions have only served as a springboard for stuff to happen. If you re-read the books, you'll notice the questions are brought up in the films but they're never answered. They make a big deal of Sirius escaping Azkaban and even go so far to say how impossible it is. But it's never explained how he did it. Likewise, how they hell did Barty Crouch Jr escape? I doubt they even tried explaining that one, hoping the momentum of the finale would get us to forget about it. As mentioned before, the importance of the Prophecy is never explained, making the whole thing a rather pointless MacGuffin and potentially harming the upcoming films as well.
While the resolutions make take a while in the novel, they allow for a sort of release. Each film presents a big mystery, and the resolutions allow us to take a step back and take it all in. While they tend to feel like the same old scene (Harry typically standing in Dumbledore's office and hearing him explain things for 30 pages), they're still very important. They're big, mythology building scenes. The series is big on character, but the mythology is what keeps it going. What do I mean by mythology? Stuff like why Voldemort wanted to kill Harry, the roles certain characters (Snape, Trelawney, Dumbledore, even Voldemort) had in bringing upon the events that helped shape the world that the characters live in, and what it all means for Harry. These seem to be ignored in the movies. Some may view it as trivial or tedious. But really, it's the big picture.
That's another thing as well. We hear about omissions or see them firsthand and it's naturally assumed that since it was important to the film, they'd surely bring it up at a more convenient time. But they never do because there never is a more convenient time to handle these things. That's why they were where they were in the book. So if they, for example, cut the last chapter of HBP from this movie, why would they include it in the next movie?
