Potter is at peace
Love blossoms, Malfoy suffers in the Half-blood Prince

By Meha Mathur
New Delhi, July 17: Welcome to the tranquil compounds of Hogwarts, where there are no bigger worries than solving love triangles. All the anxieties are reserved for the Malfoys of the world, the Potters and the Weaslys take their lessons obediently, enjoy post-school common room chats, find their love interests, shed a few tears over unrequited love and run a few dangerous errands for the headmaster. Well, this is the image created by David Yates, the director of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, not JK Rowling, the author of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

Gone is the element of suspense that pervades the book from the word go. What is Malfoy up to, who exactly is the half blood prince, and what and where exactly are the horcruxes, are treated as a subplot and rather summarily treated.

What dominates the plot is the growing chemistry between the characters in the plot. Ginny Weasley, taller than Harry now, is increasingly getting attracted to him. In fact a few sequences have been added to the plot to bring home the point. Hermione must wait in the wings as Ron flirts with Lavender Brown.

There is fair amount of humour, and even Dumbledore doesn’t spare Potter about his unshaven chin and at another point prodding him about Hermione. The Weasley twins are shown busy making a success of their business, so Ron takes their place as the comic character. Longbottom recedes into a meaningless role and the other regulars of pervious movies – Parvati Patil, Cho Chang – do not figure at all.

Another feature we miss is the beautiful train drive through the dense woods. Here, Hogwarts Express is shown traversing through a parched landscape. Though of course, Hogwarts is majestic and mesmerising as ever.

Whenever a Harry Potter movie is released, a standard take in the media is, ‘finally a movie that does justice to the book’. Though we don’t come across that refrain this time, let’s be honest and give the first director Chris Columbus his due. Choosing a perfect cast, visualising the sets and giving a celluloid image to the printed word, he made the task of future directors lot easier. What we now see, especially since the Order of Phoenix, is much of mechanical job in the name of magic and destruction. So as we saw bridges and buildings collapse in the latest celluloid version, we wondered, and many tech wizards would have pinpointed, which softwares were used.

It takes human touch to make a movie work. Those elements, believe it, were provided by Malfoy, not Potter.