Harry Potter and the cool effect

On Wednesday I got up early, took the children to school, went to work and then walked on down to the St Helier waterfront to the Cineworld cinema – in time for a film that started at 10:15.

Now this is nothing unusual for me, I’ve been to the cinema that time of the morning many times before, in fact I almost ALWAYS go to the cinema in time for the first screening.

The reason for that? There is usually nobody there – I mean why do people go to the cinema in large groups, eat noisy foods and THEN talk to each other in whispers throughout the film? I CAN STILL HEAR YOU!!!!

So by going to the first screening of the day I normally get a cinema to myself, even for the bigger films. No noise from people sitting near me, no noise from people thinking you can’t hear them – I get to be my anti-social self and enjoy a film at the same time.

But on Wednesday I went to see Harry Potter and I went to see not only the first screening of the day but also the first screening in Jersey (or at least ‘official screening’ anyway).

I was in a screen with at least 200 other people – it was ever so slightly insane. OK so it is the start/middle of the tourist season but Jersey doesn’t exactly have a ‘massive’ tourist market anymore – so it was a little mad to be in a half full large cinema screen at 10 in the morning.

Anyway to the point – Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince – the review.

I was a bit of a late-comer to the whole Harry Potter thing, getting into it around the time book four was released but I quickly caught up and was waiting impatiently in line at midnight like everyone else for books five to seven.

I heard them all in audio form as read by Stephen Fry, have watched all the movies in the cinema and have them on DVD as well. Not that I like them much.

So you now know I went into this film as a little bit of a Harry Potter fan boy, unlike other films I’ve been in to where my default position is ‘come on then, impress me’.

I was impressed by Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. In fact so impressed that I am slightly scared that Director David Yates had been looking around inside my head as he made the film.

The whole thing looked and felt almost EXACTLY as I imagined it in my head while reading the book – the different scenes panned out how I imagined they would, the conversations happened as I expected – with a couple of minor exceptions.

The first involved the Snape and Dumbledore thing – in my mind that happened on the grass outside and not in a clock tower but it was more effective this way.

The other was those things in the water in the locket scene – in my mind it was a sort of Munch inspired hands coming out of swirling water thing without seeing the rest of the body.

Instead the film had creates that sat somewhere between Dobby the House Elf and Gollum but a bit more grabby.

The relationships between the characters continued the increasingly intense and growing mutual respect and sense of dread that the last couple had started to set up.

My only concern was that the whole thing felt a little bit ‘glossy’, maybe I need to see it for a second time but the dispair didn’t really come through as intensly as I expected it to.

And when I say glossy I don’t mean it as a critisism of the look of the film – that was spectacular, it felt completely immersive, water was intense, the breaking up of the wobbly bridge out of this world and god I love the Quidditch scenes.

But I felt that maybe, just a tiny little maybe, the ability to look stunning over took some of the simpler intense scenes that could have been created between a couple of good actors on a plain set.

Overall though I would still give it a high four out of five.

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