Harry Potter The Half Blood Prince

Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix & The Half-Blood Prince

In the Order of the Phoenix, with their warning about Lord Voldemort's return scoffed at, Harry and Dumbledore are targeted by the Wizard authorities as an authoritarian bureaucrat slowly seizes power at Hogwarts. In the Half-Blood Prince, as Harry Potter begins his 6th year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he discovers an old book marked mysteriously "This book is the property of the Half-Blood Prince" and begins to learn more about Lord Voldemort's dark past.

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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince « Canadian Cinephile

, The sixth of the series, is darker still. It is an ominous picture, but it is also a hormonal picture.

David Yates is back with a Steve Kloves screenplay of a J. K. Rowling novel, of course. The characters have grown and one in particular, Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), gets to play it up a bit more than usual. Things are a little more vicious at times, but there’s also a lot of snogging going on so that evens it out. The characters are full-blown adolescents now and that spells trouble for you know who.

Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) accompanies Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) to a former professor’s house to recruit him (Jim Broadbent) to come back to Hogwarts. This is part of a plan. The good guys aren’t the only ones with plans, though, as Harry, Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) witness Draco hanging out with the Death Eaters. Apparently he’s been given some sort of sinister mission.

In potions class, Harry has to borrow a textbook and ends up with one that used to belong to “the Half-Blood Prince.” Nobody seems to know who that is, but all the answers are scribbled in the book so Harry sails through class. Feelings also develop between several characters and Harry discovers another dark truth, as you might have expected.

Yates does the trick once more, creating refined atmosphere with a few easy tricks. For one thing, the halls of Hogwarts, once brimming with inquisitiveness and activity, are significantly darker and more foreboding. The tone, dim and gloomy, fits the material well and builds to the shocking conclusion, but things are really jumbled throughout the middle of the movie. It could have been slimmed down some without losing the plot at all.

The romantic entanglements are enjoyable, with Hermione developing some serious character. Watson is outstanding in a scene where she reveals some true feelings about a particular someone. I couldn’t help but feel for her, with the pain of young love seeping through and the complications of alleged jealousy, sometimes misguided, crushing her heart. With all of this going on, who has time to worry about Lord Voldemort?

The cinematography is really on point here. It’s no wonder that it received an Oscar nomination in the category, as Bruno Delbonnel brings the lavish sets to life with elegance. Colour grading was apparently an issue initially, but Delbonnel and Yates really do draw out the dark corners and corridors with refined magnificence.

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