Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is a good movie. Heck, it’s even a great movie to the extent that it echoes what will surely be one of the most recognized accomplishments in fiction for the next 60 years if not more. To dismiss Harry Potter as “kids stuff” is to entirely miss the importance of story and why it matters to humans. To quote G.K. Chesterton, “Literature is luxury; fiction is a necessity”.
If you have not read the books or seen the movie, please stop reading here because I’m going to talk about the big ‘reveal’ at the end of this book/movie.
This second to last book in the series is essentially Harry (and the audience as well) coming the to deep realization that he will have to fight Voldemort, and as in all true Western Hero lit, he will have to fight him alone. In the battle at the end of Order of the Phoenix, Harry faces a fully prepared Voldemort for the first time. Obviously they had fought in previous books/films, but it’s in Order where Voldemort has recuperated to his full strength, gathered his full compliment of minions and executed a well thought out plan to lure out Harry and kill him. Although Harry does defeat him, he does so by small margin and it’s Dumbledore, not Harry that physically frustrates and blocks Voldemort’s attacks (in what is probably the coolest magic battle ever put to film IMO). It’s Dumbledore that leans down next to Harry and encourages him by telling him he is stronger than Voldemort. In short here as well as in Goblet of Fire when Harry is first confronted with Voldemort’s fully physical form, he is no match for The Dark Lord. He needs the support and help of those he loves and who love him.
In Half-Blood Prince, we are shown inch by inch that Dumbledore, the central father figure in Harry’s life and the person he has always counted on for protection in one form or another may also be too weak to the task of facing Voldemort. Dumbledore’s hand is rotting away from an attempt to destroy a Horcrux and when he takes Harry to the location of another lost Horcrux with the intent to take it and destroy it, we see Dumbledore weep and beg to be spared his lot as he drinks the evil liquid that protects the device. Only briefly do we catch a glimpse of Dumbledore’s real power.
So what the series has established up to this point is this: Dumbledore is Harry’s confidant, adviser, friend, father figure and protector. We’ve also established that Dumbledore is extremely powerful, more powerful that we ever suspected at the beginning of the story and probably marginally more powerful that Voldemort himself. He is if not the greatest, one of the greatest wizards of his age. A fact underscored by Voldemort’s repeated attempts to kill, mame or otherwise remove Dumbledore from the picture. This suitably raises the stakes for Harry. How can he hope to defeat someone that Dumbledore can only hold off by the slimmest of margins?
So with the stakes suitably raised, we know that it’s time for Harry to have his one last protection stripped away. It’s time to set the stage for the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort. It’s time for Dumbledore to die.
Based on Dumbledore’s importance to Harry, to the wizarding world at large and to us, the readers/audience, Dumbledore dying should be (and is in the books) a cataclysmic event. It should not only shock us, but we should get a chance to grieve along with the Harry, Hermione and Ron and the rest, a character that’s become an important part of our lives as we follow the story.
I said in the beginning that Half Blood Prince is a good, even great movie and it is. But some of the choices at the end are so absurd and unreal that it does an otherwise great movie a huge disservice.
In the book, Harry is paralyzed by Dumbledore before Dumbledore’s murder. He lies in agony, completely unable to take action to save the man that is at the center of his life. Harry as a person would HAVE to be constrained this way otherwise, as his actions in other books have demonstrated, he surely would have died trying to stop Dumbledore’s death. It’s absolutely antithetical to who we know Harry to be to have him just sit by quietly with a simple “shhhh” form Snape as Snape marches up the stairs and kills his father figure. It makes no sense. None. Just typing it out makes me laugh. If someone had verbally explained this ending to me, I would have laughed saying there’s no way the filmmakers would do something like that. Here is what the book says of Harry:
“A jet of green light shot from the end of Snape’s wand and hit Dumbledore squarely in the chest. Harry’s sreams of horror never left him; silent and unmoving, he was forced to watch as Dumbledore was blasted into the air. For a split second, he seemed to hang suspended beneath the shining skull, and then he fell slowly backward, like a great rag doll, over the battlements and out of sight.”
And although this may be technically correctly represented on the screen, Harry’s paralysis has nothing to do with a spell as in the book. Harry, the self-sacrificing, loving, act first ask questions later hero of the series sits idly by as the most important man in his life is murdered, stopped by nothing more than a “shhh”. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
But perhaps even worse (although not by much) is the horrid substitution of a full funeral scene for some goofy pretense of one where all the kids and professors raise their wands in tribute to Dumbledore. Again, this is the death of one of the most important men of his time. Something akin to Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln dying in our world. It’s also the death of arguably the most important person in Harry’s life. Inarguably he is a character that casts a huge sphere of influence across the entire 7 book series for us, the readers. If you go back and read the funeral chapter from Half-Blood Prince, I defy anyone to tell me that putting this chapter (even a shortened version of it to account for the film medium) into the movie wouldn’t have made it better. It would have given some type of closure to the characters, brought home the fact that Harry is truly alone and unprotected now and brought the audience to an emotional height. As it is, Dumbledore, hero of his age, flops to the ground in a heap and we all raise our wands like we’re at a Poison concert and Every Rose Has It's Thorn is playing. Thanks.
I’m sure that came across pretty harsh but I have to end by saying that the film is good. In fact, I’m going to go see it again with my daughter today. It’s just so damned frustrating when something as important as Dumbledore’s death is treated with the intensity of ordering a bowl of oatmeal.