“Seems strange, mate. Dumbledore sends you off to find a load of Horcruxes, but doesn’t bother to tell you how to destroy them. Doesn’t that bother you?”
Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, and his two best friends scour the magical world to destroy the Horcruxes that keep Dark Lord Voldemort alive in preparation for the final battle, as Warner Bros. executives realized this was the final book in the series and decided to split it into two movies to maximize profits.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)
Directed by David Yates
Screenplay by Steve Kloves, adapted from the novel by J.K. Rowling
There’s something that always bothered me about the HARRY POTTER series, both when I read the books and when I watched the films. It always seemed so… unrealistic that a well-regarded and advanced society would allow men and women that they KNEW to be bad people take over and strip away the freedoms and protections they held dear just to create chaos. Gaining power to be evil for the sake of being evil was something, to me, that would never happen in a civilized community.
Eleven years after the final book in the series was released, it no longer seems as weird. Can’t imagine why.
The Dark Lord Voldemort and his gang of merry Death Eaters have gained complete and total control of the Ministry of Magic and the larger wizarding world – at least the British parts that we’re familiar with. But despite this rise to power, Voldemort remains obsessed with a 17-year-old boy who managed to survive an attack from the Dark Lord when he was a baby. Everything we see Voldemort works towards his goal of defeating and ultimately killing Harry Potter, something the Death Eaters have been actively trying to do since at least the third or fourth installment of this series.
To be as bad at their jobs as they all are, the Death Eaters must have been trained by Cobra Commander.
The bigger threat to Harry, really, is his best buddy Ron Weasley. As Harry, Ron and true hero Hermione Granger go off here in search of the secret ways to kill off Voldemort, the only way author J.K. Rowling knows to create drama for the trio is for Ron to – once again – develop a streak of jealousy against his best friend. We’ve been through it before. Ron gets to feeling useless or unappreciated (or annoyed that his best buddy is snogging his sister – seriously, that’s a betrayal of the bro code!) and starts fighting with Harry and storms off.
It is completely baffling to me that Rowling thought that it made sense that someone as smart and qualified as Hermione would be all about the goofy, always-in-danger Ron. She’s just dragging herself down, man.
And much like the recent AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR, this movie was all set-up for the real action that came in the second part of the adaptation of the seventh book, which may as well have been sub-subtitled “The Quest For More Money.”