Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is a somber, quiet, funereal film. Long sections of it are spent with Harry, Ron and Hermione wandering the wilderness of Britain with no real objective other than staying alive. Ostensibly they’re out to destroy the five remaining horcruxes that each contain a piece of Voldemort’s soul (he can’t be killed until all the parts of his soul have been destroyed) but with no idea even where to start looking for all but one of them, they have little to do but sit around and wonder at the position they find themselves in. If that sounds a little boring, it is. It’s actually really really boring. And that’s probably Part 1’s biggest failing: not much happens. Harry, Ron and Hermione are out to find five horcruxes. That’s the ‘plot’ of the film. And by its conclusion, they’ve found one. That’s not much movement for a story that’s supposed to be building toward an epic conclusion almost eighteen hours and six films in the making.
But to some extent you can’t really pin the movie’s plot problems on the filmmakers because those issues are also present in the source material. By choosing to focus almost exclusively on Harry in the final book, J.K. Rowling allowed a lot of the more interesting developments to take place ‘off screen’ (the fall of the Ministry of Magic, for instance, would surely have made for a nifty little sequence) to the point where even the death of a fairly major character early in the book happens without the audience actually ‘seeing’ it. And her penchant for dei ex machina doesn’t serve the film any better than it did the book. When, for instance, Dobby the house elf appears out of nowhere to save our heroes from impending doom, it just seems like Rowling wrote herself into a corner and couldn’t think of a better way out. And with the films slavishly devoted to following the books as closely as possible (a wise decision financially if not artistically), it makes it impossible for the filmmakers to overcome the book’s fundamental flaws.
But around the edges of the story, a lot of interesting things are happening in Part 1. Now that Voldemort has returned, his followers, the Death Eaters, have begun a sort of ethnic cleansing of the wizarding world. Any wizards or witches who are not pureblood (meaning they come from Muggle (the Potterverse’s term for non-magical human) parents) are systematically hunted down, questioned and imprisoned. The obvious parallels to Nazi Germany are played up for full effect. For instance, the Death Eaters take over the Ministry of Magic (the wizarding world’s main governmental institution) and use it to their own perverted ends much as Hitler did with the Reichstag. Through the Ministry they produce all manner of anti-Muggle propaganda that clearly evokes Nazi propaganda. There are also groups of so-called Snatchers roaming the land looking for non-pureblood wizards while dressed in black leather uniforms much like the Gestapo’s.
All of these elements together evoke a feeling of genuine dread for what lies in store for Harry and his friends. It feels like there’s a real war being fought in this film. The stakes really do seem to be life and death. And, in this chapter at least, it seems impossible that Harry, Ron and Hermione could possibly triumph against the infinitely more powerful wizards arrayed against them. They will, of course, what with this being a massive Hollywood blockbuster series made mostly for children, but Part 1 ends before even the slightest ray of hope has begun to peak through the clouds. That alone makes this a remarkable film.
Unfortunately, it’s not very much fun. And at over two and a half hours, most of it spent with Harry, Ron and Hermione wandering around aimlessly while waiting to be attacked or killed, it all starts to feel a little soul crushing. And the aimlessness of Harry and his friends is mirrored in the aimlessness of the storytelling. Nothing seems to be driving the action. This happens, then that happens, then some other thing happens. Nothing builds on what came before and nothing is driving the plot. It seems as if everybody’s waiting for someone to appear and tell them what to do next. That, of course, is exactly what will happen in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, but that doesn’t change the fact that Part 1 is formless and meandering at just the time when it ought to be driving towards the series’ conclusion.
That, I suppose, is why, from an artistic standpoint, it makes sense to divide the final book into two films. Get all the boring, directionless stuff out of the way in the first film before getting on with the battle royale that will surely comprise most of the second film. That’s all well and good, but it leaves the viewer with the keen sense that this movie is all table-setting for that second part. And that’s a problem when trying to evaluate Part 1 on its own merits. When viewed as a piece of a larger series, it becomes more essential. But if you were to watch Part 1 with no prior knowledge of the series, it would be beyond worthless. And even as it is, with so much time and effort spent on establishing the tone and mood, there’s almost nothing here that feels vital to the story of this series. It seems as if you could skip this film and jump right into Part 2 without missing anything of consequence. To be sure, there are a few great sequences on par with the best moments the series has yet produced (the animated segment that explains the origin of the titular Deathly Hallows is a particular standout) but as a whole, there’s just not all that much to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1. It did make me anxious to see Part 2, though, and in the end maybe that’s all that really matters.
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