Thus this installment’s reunion vibe, heavy on cameos and returns to familiar locales, isn’t merely a concession to demanding Potterphiles, but rather a closing expression of Rowling’s belief in the primacy of camaraderie and devotion in the face of annihilation.
Still, the propulsive film (penned, like all but one of its predecessors, by Steve Kloves) remains interested in such religious notions of martyrdom, fate, and rebirth only insofar as they reflect the story’s overriding celebration of friendship as an unbreakable bond even under the greatest of strains.
FINAL DESTINATION 1 TEACHER DEATH SERIES
These quests pit treachery and self-interest against steadfastness and sacrifice, a fundamental series conflict that’s embodied by Harry and Voldemort, the Christ and Satan at the center of Rowling’s coming-of-age saga.
That objective requires breaking into dragon-guarded Gringotts Wizarding Bank with the help of one of its goblin employees (Warwick Davis), as well as convincing a Hogwarts school ghost (Kelly Macdonald) to reveal the whereabouts of a hidden tiara. Before that cataclysmic confrontation can take place, though, Deathly Hallows must first chart Harry’s attempts alongside best friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) to locate a collection of remaining Horcruxes-enchanted objects that house pieces of Voldemort’s soul, and whose destruction will make the Dark Lord mortally vulnerable. And yet Part 2 is a magnificent finale for this fantasy opus, one that pays ample justice to Harry’s long-in-the-making showdown with He Who Must Not Be Named, a battle in which life and death, the past and the future, precariously hang in the balance.
With a pop-culture goliath riding on its back, David Yates’s adaptation of the second half of Rowling’s last tome follows a Part 1 that could barely sustain itself as a stand-alone work, given that it was driven less by necessary plot fidelity than by a desire to squeeze two films’ worth of box-office profits from a single book, a bottom-line decision that’s also true of this entry’s superfluous 3-D. Rowling), mainstreamed gobbledygook terms like “Muggle,” turned its broom-flying sport Quidditch into a real-world pastime, and, to the illogical objections of some conservative commentators, celebrated youth, love, and loss as inherently magical processes. franchise that has reaped billions (including for its creator/author J.K. It’s a climax of truly epic proportions, not only for its narrative import but for the fact that it heralds the end of a beloved decade-long Warner Bros. After 10 years, seven movies, six Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers, four directors, two dead parents, one grating house elf, and incalculable amounts of CG wizardry, pubescent growing pains, budding romances, and apocalyptic fire and brimstone, we’ve finally arrived: Bespectacled Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) squares off against amphibian-faced Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.