Harry Potter? Good?

Last night, Zahier called me and said, "Adi, kau buat ape? Nak gi tgk Harry Potter tak?"
I've been alone in my room this past few days watching animes, making gundam, completing my Megatron project. So, I figure it'd be nice to go out and watch the movie plus, the movie was only released the day before. It's a rare chance to get to watch movies as popular as Harry Potter this early to its release date.

The movie's trailers all looks promising. Pretty cool actually. So I said, "boleh jer, kalau tiket masih ade."



So in short, we went to Alamanda, Putrajaya and purchased the tickets(one of Zahier's friend had booked a number of tickets beforehand).

The show was at 12:30am. Midnight screening yo~ ^^

Fast forward till after the movie.



My impression of the movie was..."What??? Is this it??"

Yeah...I'm literally disappointed with this movie. For me, it's even worse than the previous installment.

In general, plot-wise, it was slow-paced, lots of lovey-dovey stuffs, no real backstory, and too long.

*WARNING* after this line there might be some/a lot of spoilers ahead.

Read at your own risk.

Don't tell me I didn't warn you.

As if you didn't know the story already.. It's Harry Potter... You are bound to hear spoilers anyway... Like Dumbledore died, Snape is the Half-Blood Prince... Ooops!




Anyway, from what I can describe from watching the movie this one time, about 3/4 of the movie revolves around Harry's social life. Yeah... I'm serious. Okay, I might have exaggerate that a little bit, but, you know what I mean.

Too much screen time taken just to explain Harry's relationship with Ginny, Ron with Hermione. By the way, Hermione's cute!! Damnit!! Focus!

There are too much unnecessary scenes in my opinion. And then they tried to cramp all the necessary explanation towards the end of the movie.

For example, Dumbledore's death. It's suppose to be the climax of this movie but this is how it happen.

*SPOILER*

***
Dumbledore asks Harry to hide below the level their on and don't reveal himself no matter what happens. Harry hesitated at first, but eventually follows Dumbledore's requests. (They are in some sort of tower btw) Then, Draco Malfoy went up the stairs, meet Dumbledore, points his wand at Dumbledore.

Dumbledore tried to talk sense into Draco but without much success. Draco apparently without much fight(or without any fight at all), easily disarmed Dumbledore from his wand, who is apparently one of the greatest wizards of all time. Make sense eh?

Then Draco hesitated. His mission was to kill Dumbledore but he somehow couldn't find the will to do it. Then the Death Eaters came. Dumbledore greets them. The Death Eaters forces Draco to kill Dumbledore. Then Snape came.

This is what happen:
Dumbledore: Severus, please...
Snape: Avada Kedabra!(I wonder if it's the right spelling)

KABLAM!!!!
Dumbledore falls of the tower and died.
***

Just like that!!!

Then the scene where they reveal the Half-Blood Prince..


***
After Dumbledore died, Harry chases Snape who is going towards Hagrid's house.
After a little fight. Harry loses.

Snape: How do you expect to use my own spell against me.(Something like that)

Harry looks at snape in amazement.

Snape: Yes, I am the Half-Blood Prince.
***

Just like that!! The revelation of the Half-Blood Prince! That simple? No backstory, no flashbacks... Somehow Snape became important in this movie...

Voldemort didn't even get any screen time in this movie.

Like I said. To me, the movie pace was flat to the end. There were snoring all around me.


So, it was pretty disappointing movie for me. I got back, do a little search. Guess what? The movie got 80% approval from the mainstream movie critics!! 80%!!

To give you some idea,

The first review of the film came three weeks before the official release. Paul Dergarabedian of Hollywood.com ranked the film with The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and called the film a "possible Oscar misscontender". He highly praised the performance of Michael Gambon, Alan Rickman and Daniel Radcliffe. He commented, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a tour-de-force that combines style and substance, special effects and heart and most importantly great performances from all of the actors young and not-so-young". Another early review came from the UK tabloid The Sun, whose anonymous reviewer called the film "masterful" and "very emotional". The reviewer praised David Yates' directing and called Jim Broadbent's portrayal of Horace Slughorn "perfect".[104] Devin Faraci of Chud.com called the film not only the best Harry Potter film yet, but also one of the best films of the year. -taken from Wikipedia of course

See? And everyone I see went out of the cinema complaining. I was restless in my seat halfway through.

Call me "low standard" or anything, but I enjoyed Dragonball Evolution more than this movie.

Transformers 2 on the other hand, got flamed tremendously by movie critics, some says, "too many explosions", "bad acting", "too many plotholes", bla bla bla. Hell, they even called the twin robots racist because one of them having gold tooth & they speak with african american accents.. What the hell? There are white dudes who speak like that too. Plus, it was explained in the first movie that the transformers learned earth languages from the internet. Which is why jazz has an accent as well.