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Read Locke Looks at Potter, Part 1: The View from Outside.

Erika wrote a great review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from a die-hard Potter fan’s perspective, and she—and the other Potterites—have been discussing their frustration over what was left out, minimalized, or added between Half-Blood Prince the book and Half-Blood Prince the movie.

So as someone who hasn’t read a Potter book since the first two, I liked this film quite a bit—and may have liked it much more if it’d been a half hour shorter.

First, as with all the Potter films, I have problems with the plotting, as I discussed yesterday. But here’s the catch: The stuff with teen wizard hormones gone wild—the yearning loves of Harry, Ginny, Ron, Hermione, and Lavender—all works very nicely on its own. These are decent young actors (I’m especially anxious to see Rupert Grint leave the Potterverse and do some new, funky things in indie films) and director David Yates has as deft a hand with the quieter interpersonal stuff as he does with the big, dazzling action scenes. Plus there are several moments that nicely capture both the camaraderie and cockiness of late adolescence. But when your Muggle butt starts to get half numb after 150 minutes at Half-Blood Prince, it’s easy to look at the love subplots and wonder if they couldn’t have been streamlined a bit.

As a lover of fantasy adventure, I do wistfully imagine a Half-Blood Prince film that trimmed off half an hour and stayed more closely focused on Draco Malfoy’s assigned task (Tom Felton shines darkly here as the tortured soul) and Dumbledore’s quest (and of course, always more Snape). But at the same time I don’t really want to lose the teen-romance scenes. (Though I sometimes wished they’d been a bit more smoothly incorporated—having Hermione and Lavender moon and spat over Ron while the adults ponder an attempt on Dumbledore’s life was just clumsy.)

I’ve said these Potter films don’t really function as single movies—they are telling two simultaneous stories, one of the epic return of Voldemort and his beef with Harry, the other of a young boy and his friends growing up during increasingly perilous times and being forced to Step Up and Be Heroic. I think a writer and director could have sketched out and evolved our heroes’ characters with less mushy love stuff, but fact is the mushy love stuff is its own story and is equally important to the long-time Potter devotees. So these films become something else: an attempt to give the readers a film franchise that encapsulates all they love about the books.

Of course, that also caused much of the complaining from fan last week. And not having read the book, I can tell you that the things fans are complaining about (vague SPOILERS ahead) do not diminish the film in any respect for the causal viewer.

I thought the cavern scene was amazing—an action and suspense sequence that was easily one of the most gripping and exciting I’ve seen in any adventure film of late. That was flat-out crackerjack entertainment on a dark and eerie scale. It may be blasphemy, but if Steven Spielberg is going to go back to the Indiana Jones well yet again, he could do worse than to look over how that creepy, heart-pounding cave scene is executed.

And I sat up and took notice when Bellatrix Lestrange and her Death Eaters attacked Harry and pals at the Weasley home. It may not have been in the book, but the film certainly needed a bit of action at that point, and that tense and moving scene gave it a nice adrenaline boost in the midst of the hormone fest.

The stuff left out about the Horcrux clues naturally didn’t bother me, since I don’t miss what I didn’t know ever existed. And for those of you worried at how the Horcrux search will be handled in the seventh and eighth films without those plot points introduced in film six, I will say have a little faith in Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves—chances are by this point they have some idea of what they’re doing and how to tell the story they need to.

And I know many of you are upset at how the big tragic loss was handled, but I thought it was executed perfectly, no pun intended. Quick, off-hand, and tragic in its near-banality. I know you’re all missing how intense and extended and rich these things were in the book, but trust me, they worked beautifully on the screen for the casual observer. As did the memorial moment at the end. No, they probably didn't resonate as deeply and emotionally with those of you who read the books, but I never felt it was rushed or glossed over.

On top of all that, there’s the continued masterful work of Michael Gambon as Dumbledore—sure he gets more Gandalf-y with every film, but that’s not the worst thing in the world. And Jim Broadbent was just heartbreaking as Slughorn, filling his scenes with the rich melancholy denial and regret of an old man trying desperately to justify his life and his choices. There are scenes with Broadbent where you completely forget you’re watching a teen action flick about wizards and Quidditch matches.

And PG rating be damned, it’s often an impressively scary film—there’s the aforementioned cavern attack, and also another scene in particular that’s straight out of a Japanese horror film.

I can understand hard-core fans of the Potter books getting upset over changes and omissions in the films. As a Lord of the Rings nut, I gulped hard at what was left out of the films (Tom Bombadil, the Scouring of the Shire) or only included on extended DVDs (the Parlay with Saruman, the face-off between the Witch King of Angmar and Gandalf, the Mouth of Sauron).  Likewise, the life-long Tolkien fan looked with great suspicion on the addition of the warg battle in The Two Towers and the newly added plot mechanics it created. And yet, I got over my quibbles with Jackson, Walsh, and Boyen’s LOTR (or J.J. Abrams' Star Trek with a snogging Spock and Uhura) because whether you were a long-time Hobbit-head or a total noob, the film trilogy worked beautifully.

Half-Blood Prince doesn’t work quite that well as a film for me—stradding the line between pleasing the fans and making a solid, entertaining feature film, it does get a bit hung up in the middle. But there’s enough really good stuff in this one (and the other films) to help me understand why so many Potter fans feel passionately about it and what it does or doesn’t do for them. For the rest of us it’s still darn great summer entertainment.

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