Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 – review

The famous three: Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Daniel Radcliffe in The Deathly Hallows: Part 2. Photograph: Jaap Buitendijk/AP

On 18 November 2001, I began my review of the first Harry Potter movie: "It's difficult to separate the film of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone from Harry Potter the phenomenon – that astronomical budget; the producers' worldwide deal with Coca-Cola; the billion dollars-worth of associated merchandise; the actors' complaints of being exploited by Hollywood; the declaration by its director, Chris Columbus, that JK Rowling's novel merited the respect accorded to Shakespeare; the endless opinions on its significance ranging from world premiere guest Brooklyn Beckham to newspaper moralist Melanie Phillips."

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 3DProduction year: 2011Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): 12ARuntime: 130 minsDirectors: David YatesCast: Alan Rickman, Billy Nighy, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Thompson, Emma Watson, Gary Oldman, Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Ralph Fiennes, Rupert GrintMore on this film

A decade on, we have reached the end of what we now call "the journey". Seven Rowling novels have been turned into eight films which take around 20 hours to see (or 36 hours if you watch the DVD extras), and the phenomenon is infinitely greater. A generation of readers and filmgoers has grown up with the bespectacled, wand-waving wizard and saviour of the world from Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey, and the appearance of the final film coincides with the birth of a fourth Beckham child, suitably given the middle name "Seven" which could as easily be the number of books in the sacred text as her father's former Man Utd shirt.

There is a tentative attempt at the beginning of The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 at clarification, when a goblin asks: "How did you come by the sword?", referring to the Excalibur-like weapon retrieved from the bottom of a lake in The Deathly Hallows: Part 1. "It's complicated," replies a desperately tired, unwashed Harry, who rapidly dispenses with anything that might be described as a synopsis of preceding events, leaving people who don't know their Horcruxes from their Dementors to muggle through.

In that initial review in 2001, I admitted that I entered the cinema prejudiced by the hype and emerged having greatly enjoyed the film and admiring the skill that had gone into the making. I now have to say I feel as weary as the film's characters look after the final defeat of Voldemort. They stand dirty, dishevelled and triumphant among the battle-torn wreckage of Hogwarts, which resembles London after the Blitz or Berlin on VE Day.

The brilliant production designer Stuart Craig, who is to the Harry Potter series what Ken Adam was to the Bond movies (which is to say co-auteur), has done a consistently impressive job. There are moments of wit, fear, imagination and grace that one remembers over the years, but they are scattered among the long drawn-out, meandering narrative. I am readily prepared to concede that the films and the books have become for many young people and their parents a crucial part of their experience of this century. When, in the first half of The Deadly Hallows, the shifty Rufus Scrimgeour, minister of magic, says: "These are dark times", he could be any member of the coalition stepping up to the dispatch box.

In the late 1940s, the German Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann became famous for "demythologisation", the process of eliminating the myth and miracle from the Bible and bringing about a rational understanding of religion and the world. His work was celebrated in the 1950s by a few lines of comic verse that went: "Hark the herald angels sing/ Bultmann is the new-born king/ At least they would do had he not/ Demythologised the lot." At precisely the same time, a tsumani of remythologisation had got under way, first by CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien and then by lesser literary figures such as L Ron Hubbard, George Lucas and, perhaps most remarkably, JK Rowling. The Harry Potter books are a mishmash of myths ancient and modern, pulling in everything from Dickens to Wagner, the New Testament to Superman, with Harry as Christ, King Arthur and Clark Kent. They have seized on young imaginations that have lost touch with the Bible, classical mythology and historical tradition in general and thus with much that has sustained moral awareness and ethical thinking in the western world.

What Rowling's books also emphasise is an essential Britishness that has been partly maintained in the films through local casting involving almost the whole British acting profession. Hogwarts, the school of witchcraft and wizardry, s a celebration of the public school system with its houses, grand dining halls and traditional games as codified for lower-class kids in the early 20th century by Frank Richards in his stories about Greyfriars and St Jim's in the Magnet and the Gem. With this comes a stiff-upper-lip sense of duty exemplified by Harry, Ron and Hermione, and the snobbery, elitism and sense of entitlement that goes with it. Not surprisingly, the final film ends with a coda set on King's Cross station 19 years later, as the grown-up Harry, Ron and Hermione send their own children off to board at Hogwarts.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has dispensed with the amusing whimsy involving its eccentric staff that lightened the earlier films, and it takes its sense of mission very seriously. There is much portentous talk of impending death and the acceptance of it, of coming to terms with our own darker sides. There is, too, in the wielding of lethal wands, an almost gleeful surrender to Manichaeism and the politics of Armageddon. Ultimate evil must wear the face of characterless ugliness, in this case Ralph Fiennes's Voldemort looking like the inmate of an extreme burns unit, his English Patient reborn.

Two final points. First, the film is thankfully free of songs, either comic or sentimental. Second, when this epic odyssey began, I raised the question as to whether the Harry Potter films would endure as well as The Wizard of Oz. My answer then was: "Quite possibly." I'm now much less sure.

View the original article here