Half-blood Prince

As I have with each of the Harry Potter movies, I went to a midnight show last night. As I did with the release of the last book a couple years ago, I brought along my 9-year-old niece. I saw a handful of kids in the theater roughly her age, and maybe one or two younger.

She managed to get to bed around 8:30 last night, woke up and had a mini-meltdown at around 10:00--I didn't think she was going to be able to wake up and go when the time came, then she fell back asleep until 11:00 when I woke her up to go. I really, really didn't expect her to stay awake through the 153 minute long movie, but she did it, and she really liked it.

The movie has quite a quiet tone, in part because the one really big fight scene in the book really doesn't take place in the movie, although they added a different one that was not in the book. The critical event of the big fight happens, but none of the rest.

The movie stayed quite close to the book, with only a few changes here and there, nothing really major. (The last movie made a big mistake with the Room of Requirement, which I don't know how they will recover from for the last book. No such errors this time.)

They did skip one pretty important thing, by the end of the book, Harry had a much better idea of what he needs to do next than the Harry of the movie does. In short, there are a number of objects that Harry has to find in the last book, by the end of the 6th book, he has a rough idea of what most of them were. However, at the end of this movie, he really has no clue. I'm not sure how they are going to get over that hurdle in the next screenplay.

This movie was quite a bit funnier than most, which is kind of strange, because the bad guys are certainly on the move and really bad things are going to start happening soon. Most of the humor was about the trials and tribulations of teenagers in love.

I intend to see it again, but it was definitely a good movie.