10 Things I Missed in the Half-Blood Prince Movie

Due to budget and time constraints, I knew I was going to have to wait for this summer's newest Harry Potter film installment to wend its way to the family theater in our little town. It finally did that this weekend, and I was at last able to sit back and enjoy Half-Blood Prince.

I've been exercising considerable restraint by not reading many reviews beforehand! I did give in and read a couple, but even as I read them, I felt like I was trying to skim while keeping my fingers crossed behind my back. I really wanted to see what surprised, delighted or disappointed me on my own terms. I'm looking forward to going back and really reading some reviews in-depth now!

I plan to write a full review at Epinions, but some initial observations started spinning in my head on the walk home from the theater Saturday. Despite the title, please don't think this is just a list of nit-picks. I weave in thoughts about things I enjoyed as well. HP purist that I am, some changes and omissions bothered me more than others, because they felt like missed opportunities.

Still I found I was able to enter the movie on its own terms more easily than usual. The film world of Harry Potter is so different than the book world that in some ways that's getting easier...with each installment, I feel like we're returning to a world that feels more consistently familiar, even if it still doesn't feel like the landscape of the books.

Without further ado, here were 10 things I especially missed:

1. Color. I expected this film to be emotionally dark, but even the trailers didn't prepare me for this film's visual darkness. Sometimes it wasn't even so much darkness as plain lack of color in key places. The cave scene where Dumbledore drinks the awful potion guarding the fake horcrux is one case in point. The whole scene felt washed out, full of blacks, whites, grays...there was almost an ice sculpture feel to the inferi-surrounded island with the basin, and certainly no green glow. That poisonous Slytherinesque green always felt central to me.

I liked the bright green serpentine hourglass in Slughorn's office, which provided an arresting visual link between the Slughorn-Riddle memory sequences. But I just missed color: the brighter gold I'd always imagined for liquid luck, the more lurid colors of Dumbledore's plum colored suit in the memory sequence where he first meets young Riddle. The memory sequences themselves felt purposefully infused with a washed-out/bad-print old movie feel, made murkier by that inkblot-in-water pensieve effect the filmmakers clearly loved. Cool effect, but it made the whole memory sequences feel less substantial somehow, more dream-like than something Harry actually bodily fell into and experienced.

And speaking of the pensieve memories, kudos to the set designers for that odd medieval castle-like cabinet where Dumbledore kept all the little vials of Voldemort memories, each of them dated and sorted. More than anything that actually got said (Kloves in his usual "exposition be scorned" mode) the shots of that cabinet gave us a real understanding of how long and hard Dumbledore had worked to catalog and understand Voldemort's past.

2. "You are with me/I am not worried, Harry…I am with you." The key Dumbledore quotes of the book, and the ones that so brilliantly bookend the narrative action and emphasize the turning of the tide. I had been prepared for this glaring omission by Janet and Erin, but I still felt stupefied by their exclusion. I know the whole Dumbledore/Harry relationship has been played quite differently in the films than within the books, but even so, the inclusion of these lines would have felt like a no-brainer for me had I been writing that screenplay!

3. "Blocked again and again and again until you learn to keep your mouth shut and your mind closed, Potter!" Was anyone else as excited as I was about hearing Alan Rickman deliver those lines, with all their venom and hidden meaning? I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by their absence. The films are famous for not giving Rickman enough screen time, and though he squeezes every ounce from every scene (I especially thought he did well with the unbreakable vow) I was disappointed in his final scenes. The whole climax was disappointing but the lack of anguish in Snape when confronted by Harry was especially disappointing.

I may not be playing fair: the anguish was there, I guess, just not at all at the level of intensity as I'd imagined it -- and that goes for Harry's anger too. Hardly anyone seemed to notice, for instance, that Hagrid's house had just burst into flames. Where was Fang's howling (which could have served to heighten the tension and also remind legions of faithful HP readers that Snape's pain was described in terms of the dog in the burning house)? Where was Harry's fear over the possible loss of Hagrid (for that matter, where was Hagrid in this film? Hardly around.) The fact that we'd also already seen the Burrow (the Burrow?!?) set on fire also lessened the impact here. My goodness, but they gave a lot of screen time to Bellatrix, who seemed to get her kicks from destroying or torching anything in reach.

4. Neville. I know he doesn't do much in this book, but they preserved almost no role for him at all. I guess Draco's increased role (very well-played by Tom Felton) squeezed out any possibility, but I missed Neville. They did a better job of giving Luna some moments and she's not prominent in this storyline either.

5. The Battle at Hogwarts. I was prepared for this to be missing too, but I still couldn't fathom why. The film does a terrific job of showing us Draco's tortured obsession with his "mission" and the mounting tension of his plans...clearly something, something BIG! is supposed to happen with that spooky vanishing cabinet in the Room of Requirement. (Another bravo for the visuals of the cabinets...I could somehow never quite picture what those things should look like when I read about them, and the cruelly pointed angles and antique look were great.)

In the end, however, the fact that Draco manages to get death eaters into Hogwarts doesn't seem to make any difference at all. Why were they there? They "encourage" him in his task on the tower, they mock Dumbledore a little bit, they exult Dumbledore’s death, and then they hightail it out there in an obedient little line behind the hustling Snape, with only Bellatrix doing her manic bully-dance and destructive bit in the Great Hall. I have heard speculation that the filmmakers felt like they needed to add "menace" to the storyline, hence the weird attack on the burrow, but what more menace do you need than the school itself attacked? I've always felt that those moments with vulnerable 15 year olds fighting death eaters are some of the most perilous. This battle needn't be prolonged...it's more a prelude to the ultimate Battle of Hogwarts at the end of DH...but it should be there. Among other things, it would provide opportunity to show Ginny, Luna, Neville and various order members fighting. I know Ginny gets her moment in the burrow scene, and perhaps they wanted to highlight her, given the romantic build-up between her and Harry (which for the most part, I think they handled well).

6. Harry's invisibility cloak. A key loss. If I'm recalling correctly, we only ever see him use it on the train, when Draco discovers him eavesdropping. Dumbledore doesn't tell him to bring it along or keep it on his person for the entire year, and he certainly doesn't immobilize him beneath it for the key scene on the tower. Maybe they wanted Harry to be more complicit in the scene? His obedience to Dumbledore's orders to stay hidden/not do anything come back to haunt him already at the end of the film, and that's especially played up by the very interesting choice they made to have Snape walk right past him and put his finger to his lips, as though reminding Harry that they're on the "same side.” Ironically, of course, they are, though Harry won't know that for a long time and that moment can only serve to haunt him more in the meantime.

I was expecting to see Harry immobilized, suffering the nightmarish anguish of not being able to move while also under the protection, one last time, of his mentor, who clearly has a plan. While I didn't necessarily like the changes here, I found them interesting. One could argue that we're being set up for the moment when Harry must choose to obey/trust and have the self-control to *not act* on his natural impulses in DH (when he chooses to trust Dumbledore and go after the Horcruxes, not the Hallows). Given the inclusion of the line "trust me" from Dumbledore (which I liked) in the tower scene, I hope that's where they're going.

7. Dumbledore's weakness and gallantry. Just not enough of it here. I don't know how much of this is Gambon's interpretation and how much it comes through in the way they're writing Dumbledore, but he's just so incredibly different than book Dumbledore. We see him weakened initially by the potion in the cave (though he doesn't seem to suffer as much mental anguish) but he snaps back with that huge ring of fire and never really seems to weaken again.

In the book, one gets the feeling that his heroics from the fire-ring up until the tower cost him tremendous and amazing physical effort. The scene where he offers Draco mercy and speaks courteously to the death eaters moves me to tears every time I read it in part because he does these things as he slowly slides, inch by inch, down the wall of the tower, his life and strength almost extinguished, his time already almost poured out. It makes Snape's killing much more understandable as an act of mercy, and it also emphasizes Dumbledore's willing sacrifice of himself. I've always heard his "please" to Snape said in agonized tones. Film Dumbledore was still so calm and in control it was a bit unnerving. And I was surprised, given the fact that I have never failed to cry when reading this scene, that I was completely dry-eyed through the same scene in the film.

8. Ministry menace. One thing that director David Yates did so well in the fifth film was play up the ineptness and petty meanness of the Ministry. I know that permeates the storyline of Phoenix, so perhaps it was a given when thinking about what to emphasize. I missed feeling any sort of ministry presence in this film, beyond a couple of nods from Daily Prophet headlines and a joke in the Weasley twins' new shop (which incidentally did give the film a momentary and dizzying burst of color!). Ministry involvement wouldn't have needed to be as thick as Rowling lays it on but we miss a crucial piece of Harry's coming of age when we don't see his ongoing interaction with official ministry types. A visit from the new minister and an attempt to talk Harry into being the ministry poster boy, calmly rebuffed, would have been a welcome brief inclusion. Given Voldemort's overtaking of the ministry in the final story, and Harry's ongoing clashes with the establishment (think about Scrimgeour's unwilling surrender of the bequests from Albus' will) we could have had some valuable set-up for the final film. As it is, we've not even met Scrimgeour.

9. Exposition about the horcruxes. I bow to Janet Batchler's wisdom; she says they can still get themselves out the hole they've dug on this one in films 7 (parts A and B) and I believe it. But I will be interested to see how. The lack of explanation about horcruxes felt glaring on so many levels (and I wondered if anyone just watching the movies, without the background of the books, would have understood them at all). I missed a lot of things here, including the pensieve memories that would have given us more background on Voldemort and more understanding of his obsession with "things" and places (the ring, the cave).

I thought they took an interesting risk in the pointed way Dumbledore looked at Harry's scar (as though the idea had just come to him? that seemed odd) as they talked about the horcruxes, though Harry's cluelessness, played well by Radcliffe, rang true. I missed the litany of the horcruxes at the end, which book Harry receives and repeats from Dumbledore like marching orders, like a life-line that helps him to understand, at least a little, what he needs to do next. Whenever I read that, I always feel echoes of Aslan giving Jill the signs in the Silver Chair.

10. More time with Moms. Narcissa seemed more fragile than I expected. Without the Gaunt memories from the pensieve, we lost our introduction to Merope. The difference between Harry and Tom's mothers has always felt profound and sad. I also missed more time with the Weasley family -- we hardly see Molly at all, except to watch her mourn the inexplicable loss of her house. And while I thought Slughorn's musings about Lily incredibly moving -- Jim Broadbent turned in an amazing performance -- I still wish there had been a little more talk of Lily in terms of Harry supposedly "inheriting" her potions skill. How easy it would have been to show Snape galled because of that and all its consequent layers of meaning.

I missed other things (Dursleys being lectured by Dumbledore, Moaning Myrtle, Luna's commentary at the Quidditch match, mopey Tonks in love with Lupin) but I think these were my main 10, at least on first viewing. I was pleasantly surprised Rupert Grint's really funny performance as the lovestruck Ron, and I loved the moment where Harry still looked like the magic-struck eleven year old while he watched Dumbledore set Slughorn’s house to rights with a few waves of his wand.

At least on first listen, I found Nicholas Hooper's score disappointing. The main themes he developed in Phoenix (like the "Fireworks" theme for the Weasley twins) were back, but I was hoping to be wowed by his music for the cave or the tower scenes. I don’t remember the music much at all.

All in all, very glad I finally saw the film. I feel genuinely curious about how they’ll approach the two-part finale, especially given the challenges they’ve set themselves! Your thoughts?