What a shame.

Rating: 4/10 (28 January 2011)

It's a shame because almost every movie gets between a 7-8 out of 10 for me (Half-Blood Prince gets a 6.5 because, well, it had little to do with the Half-Blood Prince. Snape had a much bigger role in the book) for it's general accuracy and decent action that was paced well with the general school-time shenanigans.
TDH:Part 1 falls on it's face with this. NOTHING HAPPENS. It's two hours of... very little. They could have taken 20 minutes from this movie and just tack it onto Part 2 and call it one movie.
I've always been opposed to this whole idea of "splitting" the movies, but I at least understood why. Even the book was just one big scavenger hunt. Why devote two extra hours to this nonsense? Well, if they had just automatically found every Magical McGuffin, people would complain about it being too easy. But as it is, we're complaining because it was boring.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm not a director. But from 6 previously decent movies, the director could have done this better.
Here's the general outline of this movie; Intro. Fight scene. Wedding. Fight scene. Escape. Camping. More camping. A fight scene. A chase scene! More camping. Dark Lord gains major magical McGuffin. Movie ends.
Oddly, my favorite scenes weren't the fighting or the camping. I'm a sucker for character development and it was sparse, but present. For example; Harry going to his birth-town. That was a strangely fascinating scene, even in its simplicity.
So, very clever. People are still required to sit through this crap in order to be caught up with part 2. Although, someone can just read reviews and summaries and miss very little. So you have that option.