Preview: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Jul 14 2009 by David Whetstone, The Journal
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which opens tomorrow, keeps David Whetstone on the edge of his seat
Resigned to yet more hectic dashing about, the boy wizard replies to Dumbledore’s cursory advice about what’s to come (a sort of Hogwarts in-flight safety announcement) by saying: "Actually, after all these years I just sort of go with it." As you might guess, this film has a nice line in tongue-in-cheek.
The pair whizz off to recruit Jim Broadbent who is disguised as a sofa in a wrecked house and going under the name of Horace Slughorn. Now he is to be potions master at Hogwarts – but only because he knows a thing or two about Tom Riddle, a very naughty boy who turned into Harry’s nemesis, Voldemort.
Perhaps my favourite moment comes as Slughorn poses on a blasted heath with Radcliffe’s Harry and Robbie Coltrane’s Hagrid as they mourn the death of a giant spider.
The Hogwarts setting is a fantastic realisation of everything that is glowering and forbidding and yet somehow comforting about this land of ours with its gruesome history. There are huge corridors and cloisters, vertiginous towers and lots of junk-filled spaces with nasty surprises.
Really serious baddies like blond Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) and black-clad Severus Snape, oozing malicious intent in a way only Alan Rickman knows how, lurk in the shadowy corners.
And just as I’ve finished marvelling at the incredibly lined contours of Dame Maggie Smith’s famous face, I’m brought up short by Helena Bonham Carter’s unblemished beauty.
Admittedly the one-time English rose of Merchant Ivory is now got up like a goth to play one of the bridge-wrecking wraiths, but the thought occurs in the passing mayhem that she’s still a bit of a poster girl.
But as the old guard show off their Rada-honed skills, our young hero gets stuck into the matter to hand – retrieving bits of Voldemort’s soul that the fiend hid to secure some measure of eternal life.
The quest is complicated by rampant teenage hormones which see Hermione’s feelings for Ron Weasley hijacked by a love rival and Harry, despite an apparent initial disinterest in such soppy stuff, getting friendly with Ron’s younger sister, Ginny.
Little is resolved in the film but it sets the scene for the concluding cinematic episode in some style. Not just an epic, I’d suggest, but an epic epic. Now I’m going to give those books another crack so I’ll be better prepared for the final episode.
