Last night I watched the DVD of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (PART 1). I read the book some time ago and the film follows the book pretty straightforwardly. Every English actor who's ever worked must have got a day's pay from this production since apart from the three children and Ralph Fiennes most appearances are very brief.
The youngsters are now 17 and we get a lot of teenage angst as well as the features of puppy love. We are still at the derring-do stage of the adventure, though the death of the house-elf is a bit moving and we can grieve also over the demise of Dead-Eye. But we had all that with Sirius Black and Dumbledore in previous episodes.
With one film to go, can we evaluate the whole series? As a saga of good versus evil, it doesn't have the sweep of Lord of the Rings. Some have made a fuss about all the sorcery being anti-Christian, but those are just the accoutrement's of the genre.
In the story of the three brothers that explains the Deathly Hallows we begin to see the morality behind the series. Ambition and pride and selfishness are all denigrated; humility is prized. Not very deep then. Betrayal for selfish ends is what haunts them, but Harry is going to have to do something big to defeat Voldemort. I wonder what it could be?
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