Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a movie I feel is best reviewed through comparing it to the previous film, Order of the Phoenix.
Overall it was a beautifully directed film, conveying a constant sense of forward motion. We saw the change in seasons, Harry performing his schoolwork while threatened by the dangers of the outside world. There was a sense of the weeks and months passing, as the new Defence Against The Dark Arts teacher tightened her grip on the running of the school while Harry and his friends resisted her as best they could. Harry Potter's classes, Harry's conversations, Harry's friendships and Harry's explorations all built and rose to a titanic clash of wills where bloodthirsty wizards surrounded six teenaged amateurs.
However for me it was a collection of seemingly random scenes, where Harry witnesses various events take place, observing without taking action. He mostly sees various romances between his supporting cast members, which serve to fill in the time until the conclusion. There is almost no sense of temporal progression, no visual sense of advancing classes, progress in relationships or any visual sense of constant development. Harry passes through an entire year and attends only one class. The school year feels like a couple weeks at best. In taking the approach of killing time until the climax, the film destroys any sense of time.
The film was a well -shot and sharply edited film, featuring gorgeous direction and well-arranged scene transitions that slowly cranked up the tension and suspense. Thinking of this film brings to mind Hermione imploring Harry to teach the students self-defense, which was followed by pulling back through the windows of the dorm and streaking back to the village, where Harry gave his call to arms. Or the exhilarating broomstick flight. And the atmospheric, haunting confrontation in the rain-soaked tunnel where Harry faced two ghostly apparitions who had come to take his soul. Or the sequence where the euphoria of the students successfully rebelling against Professor Umbridge was contrasted with the horror of Harry seeing his godfather tortured.
Half-Blood Prince is devoid of proper scene transitions; every cut is rough, confusing, and scenes begin abruptly and conclude awkwardly. The cutting from Harry at Ron's house to the Hogwarts Express is offputting and clumsy. The shortcuts taken in editing are obvious and disruptive to the sense of progression; the editing in sequences like Harry filling the goblet and pouring the contents down Dumbledore's mouth are positively amateurish. One of the worst scene transitions is cutting from Dumbledore in his office informing Harry of their mission to Dumbledore and Harry preparing to teleport from the tower. There is no sense of the pair having moved in space or any passage of time; they're just abruptly in a different location for no clear reason. And while there are a few standout shots, from the lake of fire to Ginny's kiss, overall, the direction is astonishingly artless and dull. The central action sequence is a handful of actors huddled together in the middle of a swamp pointing wooden sticks in random directions. The villains inexplicably fail to focus their fire on this one location. It's astonishing to believe Half-Blood Prince and Order of the Phoenix are the work of the same director. It is a well-scripted film that understood how to let Harry, Ron and Hermione bounce off each other with their conflicting approaches, conversational styles and personalities. It however has awkward scenes of forced comedy that have the characters making silly faces at each other rather than interacting genuinely.
The film was thoughtfully structured able to distill the complex details of J.K. Rowling's novel to a tightly-paced plot. It accomplished this because the script chose to focus on one specific theme of the novel; the film set its attention on Harry's isolation. The movie centered on Harry being alienated and cast out from the wizarding community, hostile towards his friends, and thinking he faced the world alone, only to eventually learn to unite his allies to defy their enemies and vanquish their demons. Almost every scene, every shot, every conversation in Order of the Phoenix is about Harry's position relative to his friends and his classmates. Almost every scene shows Harry either isolating himself, then struggling to move closer another individual or a group, only to be repelled or driven off or taken away. The opening shot of Order of the Phoenix was Harry sitting alone in a playground. The closing shot was Harry walking amongst his classmates.
Half-Blood Prince has no theme beyond fulfilling the necessity of having a movie between the fifth and seventh installment. The novel was all about exploring the two fixtures of good and evil in the Harry Potter universe; the malevolent Lord Voldemort's origins are revealed as loveless and cold, while the seemingly omniscient, always wise Dumbledore is exposed as vulnerable, flawed and only human. The film fails to even touch upon these character arcs. Voldemort's childhood is barely featured. Dumbledore isn't the charming, suave, compassionate, knowing man of the novels, but simply a bearded authority figure just like every other bearded authority figure in fantasy fiction.
Watching this movie made me realize how the Harry Potter team at Warner Bros. really goes from zero to clueless the second talents like Alfonso Cuaron and Michael Goldenberg aren't behind the wheel. With regret, I am finished seeing Harry Potter films unless it's a slow night and I feel up for a rental. David Yates seemed to really understand the characters and significance of the series in the previous film, but Half-Blood Prince has him doing a very convincing impression of someone who doesn't, and the Yates/Kloves pairing will be behind the next two films.
