Book vs Movie: Harry Potter part 3 – What’s the Difference?

This month CineFix finishes their series covering the Harry Potter movie adaptations. This instalment discusses the differences between the Half-Blood Prince and The Deadly Hallows books, and their associated movies in What’s the Difference?

It has to be said that the movie adaptations made some odd choices of material to drop, and this created problems as the series went on. If the movies were meant to be independent of the books then you would have a hard time following some of the minor plot points or McGuffins. The mirror shard and Snape as the Half-Blood Prince reveal are just two examples. I actually thought the wand lore and Deathly Hallows were poorly handled in the movies, but it has been some time since I saw the movies, so I could be misremembering.

One thing that really annoyed me about the adaptation of the Half-Blood Prince was the Burrows attack. Not only did that make the Burrows a non-safe house ahead of schedule for the series, as discussed in the video, but it served no purpose to the plot of the movie. It was obvious why the movie makers did this: they needed some action for pacing. Because tension and suspense are so 1950’s. Considering the attack wasn’t in the book and there were action set-pieces they were ignoring or about to get to, it stuck out like a sore thumb in a proctologist’s office.

The other thing worth mentioning is the omission or marginalising of the minor characters from the books. Tonks is an obvious one, especially given the tragedy that befalls she and Lupin, and thus her son. But ensemble casts are hard to manage in a movie, so trimming is always going to happen. But one of the unforgivable marginalisations is discussed in the video: Neville Longbottom. Since he was the second possible “chosen one”, he really deserved better in the movies, especially later in the series. The other character that gets a short shrift is Luna Lovegood. I liked the implication in the books that Harry and friends felt guilty for not realising that Luna regarded them as close friends. And don’t get me started on SPEW and Dobby.

With this series on the Harry Potter adaptations done, I think it is time to raise a chief criticism of the Harry Potter movies. I actually think the books would have been better suited by a TV series adaptation. Of course, they started doing the adaptations before that was the cool thing to do with potentially big franchises. So while it is easy to forget that once upon a time not every fantasy author was clamouring for an HBO series based on their books, that time did exist. Of course, several billion dollars in movie earnings probably disagrees with me.