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Six ways to make sure HBP is awesome
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How to make HBP soar?
We are just a few weeks away from the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Harry Potter fans are getting ready to love, hate, or something-in-between it. Here are six things that, if done right, will help make sure the film is a home run.
Spoiler alert! There are massive spoilers for the sixth film in this post. Do not read below this if you do not want to know!
I: Dumbledore:
Harry's relationship with Dumbledore has not been as fully fleshed out in the movies as it is in the books: In the books it begins with Harry looking up to who he sees as an ideal wizard. In book five, however, the relationship takes a hard left, and we start to see Dumbledore as he is: a man with faults and foibles who loves Harry like a son and yet is playing his own potentially lethal game of chess with Harry's life. In turn, Harry starts to view Dumbledore as mortal instead of godly. As the relationship between the two famous wizards develops, it also becomes more relatable, and easier to enjoy. The time the two spend together in the sixth book helps to heal some of the rough patches (which will be gashed open again for Harry in seven, for different reasons). By the time Dumbledore falls from the Lightning-Struck Tower, his death is close, and hard, and felt by all.
It has not been the same in the movies. Whether for lack of time and space, or the very unfortunate post-movie-two death of Richard Harris, Dumbledore has not been the steady and assuring force that he is in the first four books. There's been very little screen time between him and Harry, and for years fans have bemoaned the fact that if this is not rectified and rectified well in the sixth film, Dumbledore's eventual death will have all the impact of a smack with a wet towel.
There is genuine care between Harry and Dumbledore: Harry is paralyzed by his death. His death is what sets Harry on his final path of Horcrux-destroying fury. The characters inside the film have to show real love for Dumbledore before he is taken from us to make sure the moment doesn't lose any of its heft.
II: Tom Riddle's early character:
Tom Riddle is the most important (quasi-)new character in Half-Blood Prince and doing his backstory right will mean a massive ripple effect for the remaining two films. The casting of Ralph Fiennes' nephew, Hero Fiennes-Tiffin, was inspired, and not at all for the family relation: take one look at that boy acting in the trailer and you'll see it. The quiet confidence in his own malice, the seething resentment, the light in his eyes as he realizes his own power... yes. Yes, yes, yes. If it's just like that through the film, and the flashbacks tell the most relevant kernels of Voldemort's story, all will be well.
III: Snape's flight from Hogwarts:
Ask any Harry Potter fan about their favorite Snape moment and you won't get far before hearing this: "DON'T CALL ME COWARD!" That line, for many, was proof that Snape was, despite all available evidence, actually working for Dumbledore: It gave many fans the faith that Dumbledore himself had that the potions master would not betray the side of right in the end. Moments after he kills the old headmaster, while he is fleeing the grounds and Harry's advances, as Death Eaters siege Hogwarts and Hagrid's hut burns, for Snape to pause only when he is called coward meant that he had just done something very difficult for him, and very brave, something that was hurting him. The response was a chink in his usually impenetrable armor, and he is lucky there was a battle raging around him or he might have been heard, and his cover wrecked. He was also lucky Harry, too, was grieving the death of the headmaster or he might have wondered why Snape would have been so affected by one insult. (Snape, like so many, is the beneficiary of Harry's occasional slowness.)
This line, and all of Snape's actions after that fateful moment in this film, must strike that balance: Snape, trying to keep his cover, protect Draco, and even attempt to teach Harry as he flees the grounds (talk about multi-tasking!); Harry, distraught and murderous, chasing after the man he thinks has taken his world away from him. Rickman's acting and the direction must be as inscrutable and spotless as these scenes are in the book.
IV: Relationship antics:
It's not just about Ron and Lavender: the hormone level in the sixth year of Hogwarts students should absolutely reach a silly, giddy peak in this film. There was too much angst in book five to truly enjoy it - Harry and Cho snogging while one is crying over an ex-boyfriend's gruesome death? No, let's have some of that good old farcical romance that happens when too many emotions occur inside the brains and bodies of teenagers that have no idea what to do with them yet. It should be as we all remember high school being - which is to say, ridiculous.
V: Post-battle scenes
It's not just about Snape and Dumbledore. When Dumbledore falls off the tower he leaves behind him wreckage of saddened students and staff who have never imagined life at the school without him. We should be able to see this loss on all of their faces and in their actions. The case for Dumbledore's worth to the school hasn't been made by harshly delivered lines like "Don't you all have studying to do!" from movie five or his distracted and dizzied take in the third film. It can be done with artful direction here.
VI: Draco Malfoy's humanity:
Draco has a great role in this film and it's going to be fun watching Tom Felton rise from starring background player to main actor. Draco turns from one-dimensional childish bully to one of the more complex and interesting characters in the series: he wants to become a Death Eater, and seems to have even been imprinted with the mark on his left forearm. He works all year on a plan to let Death Eaters into the school and kill Dumbledore. He is successful on one part but has a lot of trouble with the second: he is found crying in a bathroom thinking about making good on that task. And when he gets the chance to try it - when he is given the very rare opportunity to do what so many wizards before him, including Grindelwald and Voldemort, could not - his hand falters, his humanity shows.
This play between Draco as uber-evil-Death-Eater and conflicted-boy-who's-gotten-in-wayyyyy-over-his-head leads to one of the best Dumbledore exchanges in all seven books: The old headmaster, weakened, disarmed and dying, hears Draco insist that he's at his mercy and says:
"No, Draco. It is my mercy, and not yours, that matters now."
If the conversation on that tower does not reach this caliber of awesome - revealing the astounding brilliance and yet kindness and mercy of Dumbledore, at the same time as Draco shows himself to be complicated, vulnerable, caught in a terrible place - the movie will suffer dearly.
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